The Holocaust, Climate Science and Proof

I’ve been a student of history for a long time and have read quite a bit about Nazi Germany and WWII. In fact right now, having found audible.com I’m listening to an audio book The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard Evans, while I walk, drive and exercise.

It’s heartbreaking to read about the war and to read about the Holocaust. Words fail me to describe the awfulness of that regime and what they did.

But it’s pretty easy for someone who is curious about evidence, or who has had someone question whether or not the Holocaust actually took place, to find and understand the proof.

The photos. The bodies. The survivors’ accounts. The thousands of eyewitness accounts. The army reports. The stated aims of Hitler and many of the leading Nazis in their own words.

We can all understand how to weigh up witness accounts and photos. It’s intrinsic to our nature.

People who don’t believe the Nazis murdered millions of Jews are denying simple and overwhelming evidence.

Let’s compare that with the evidence behind the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the inevitability of a 2-6ºC rise in temperature if we continue to add CO2 and other GHGs to the atmosphere.

Step 1 – The ‘greenhouse’ effect

To accept AGW of course you need to accept the ‘greenhouse’ effect. It’s fundamental science and not in question but what if you don’t take my word for it? What if you want to check for yourself?

And by the way, the complexity of the subject for many people becomes clear even at this stage, with countless hordes not even clear that the ‘greenhouse’ effect is a just a building block for AGW. It is not itself AGW.

AGW relies on the ‘greenhouse’ effect but also on other considerations.

I wrote The “Greenhouse” Effect Explained in Simple Terms to make it simple, yet not too simple. But that article relies on (and references) many basics – radiation, absorption and emission of radiation through gases, heat transfer and convection. All of those are necessary to understand the greenhouse effect.

Many people have conceptual misunderstandings of “basic” physics. In reading comments on this blog and on other blogs I often see fundamental misunderstanding of how heat transfer works. No space here for that.

But the difficulty of communicating a physics idea is very real. Once someone has a conceptual block because they think some process works a subtly different way, the only way to resolve the question is with equations. It is further complicated because these misunderstandings are often unstated by the commenter – they don’t realize they see the world differently from physics basics.

So when we need to demonstrate that the greenhouse effect is real, and that it increases with more GHGs we need some equations. And by ‘increases’ I mean more GHGs mean a higher surface temperature, all other things being equal. (Which, of course, they never are).

The terms are explained in that article. In brief, the equation shows how the intensity of radiation at the top of the atmosphere at one wavelength is affected by the number of absorbing molecules in the atmosphere. And, obviously, you have to integrate it over all wavelengths. Why do I even bring that up, it’s so simple?

Voila.

And equally obviously, anyone questioning the validity of the equation, or the results from the equation, is doing so from evil motives.

I do need to add that we have to prescribe the temperature profile in the atmosphere (and the GHG concentration) to be able to solve this equation. The temperature profile is known as the lapse rate – temperature reduces as you go up in altitude. In the tropical regions where convection is stronger we can come up with a decent equation for the lapse rate.

All you have to know is the first law of thermodynamics, the ideal gas law and the equation for the change in pressure vs height due to the mass of the atmosphere. Everyone can do this in their heads of course. But here it is:

So with these two elementary principles we can prove that more GHGs means a higher surface temperature before any feedbacks. That’s the ‘greenhouse’ effect.

Step 2 – AGW = ‘Greenhouse effect’ plus feedbacks

This is so simple. Feedbacks are things like – a hotter world probably has more water vapor in the atmosphere, and water vapor is the most important GHG, so this amplifies the ‘greenhouse’ effect of increasing CO2. Calculating the changes is only a little more difficult than the super simple equations I showed earlier.

You just need a GCM – a climate model run on a supercomputer. That’s all.

There are many misconceptions about climate models but only people who are determined to believe a lie can possibly believe them.

As an example, many people think that the amplifying effect, or positive feedback, of water vapor is programmed into the GCMs. All they have to do is have a quick read through the 200-page technical summary of a model like say CAM (community atmosphere model).

As soon as anyone reads this – and if they can’t be bothered to find the reference via Google Scholar and read it, well, what can you say about such people – as soon as they read it, of course, it’s crystal clear that positive feedback isn’t “programmed in” to climate models.

So GCMs all come to the conclusion that more GHGs results in a hotter world (2-6ºC). They solve basic physics equations in a “grid” fashion, stepping forward in time, and so the result is clear and indisputable.

This is the work of attributing the last century’s rise in temperature to the increases in anthropogenic GHGs. I followed the trail of papers back and found one of the source papers by Hasselmann from 1993. In it we can clearly see the basis for attribution studies:

Now it’s very difficult to believe that anyone questioning attribution studies isn’t of evil intent. After all, there is the basic principle in black and white. Who could be confused?

As a side note, to excuse my own irredeemable article on the topic, the actual basis of attribution isn’t just in these equations, it is also in the assumption that climate models accurately calculate the statistics of natural variability. The IPCC chapter on attribution doesn’t really make this clear, yet in another chapter (11) different authors suggest completely restating the statistical certainty claimed in the attribution chapter because “..it is explicitly recognized that there are sources of uncertainty not simulated by the models”. Their ad hoc restatement, while more accurate than the executive summary, still needs to be justified.

However, none of this can offer me redemption.

Step 4 – Unprecedented Temperature Rises

(This could probably be switched around with step 3. The order here is not important).

Once people have seen the unprecedented rise in temperature this century, how could they not align themselves with the forces of good?

Anthropogenic warming ‘writ large’ (AR5, chapter 2):

There’s the problem. The last 400,000 years were quite static by comparison:

The red is a Greenland ice core proxy for temperature, the green is a mid-latitude SST estimate – and it’s important to understand that calculating global annual temperatures is quite difficult and not done here.

So no one who looks at climate history can possibly be excused for not agreeing with consensus climate science, whatever that is when we come to “consensus paleoclimate”.. It was helpful to read Chapter 5 of AR5:

Anyway, the key takeaway message is that the recent temperature history is another demonstration that anyone not in line with consensus climate science is clearly acting from evil motives.

Conclusion

I thought about putting a photo of the Holocaust from a concentration camp next to a few pages of mathematical equations – to make a point. But that would be truly awful.

That would trivialize the memory of the terrible suffering of millions of people under one of the most evil regimes the world has seen.

And that, in fact, is my point.

I can’t find words to describe how I feel about the apologists for the Nazi regime, and those who deny that the holocaust took place. The evidence for the genocide is overwhelming and everyone can understand it.

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

By comparison, understanding climate means understanding maths, physics and statistics. This is hard, very hard. It’s time consuming, requires some training (although people can be self-taught), actually requires academic access to be able to follow the thread of an argument through papers over a few decades – and lots and lots of dedication.

The worst you could say is people who don’t accept ‘consensus climate science’ are likely finding basic – or advanced – thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer and statistics a little difficult and might have misunderstood, or missed, a step somewhere.

The best you could say is with such a complex subject straddling so many different disciplines, they might be entitled to have a point.

If you have no soul and no empathy for the suffering of millions under the Third Reich, keep calling people who don’t accept consensus climate science ‘deniers’.

Otherwise, just stop.

Important Note: The moderation filter on comments is setup to catch the ‘D..r’ word specifically because such name calling is not accepted on this blog. This article is an exception to the norm, but I can’t change the filter for one article.

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558 Responses

The danger of moral relativism is that, by its very action, it trivialises the ugly fruit borne of past acts of moral relativism, and thus perpetuates. To devalue the right to life of another by word or deed is to overstep an absolute moral boundary. To incite others to do likewise is the same deal. I find the world of physics is pretty cute by comparison.

I live in a state where the vast majority of people believe global warming is a real and serious problem (Massachusetts). I live in a country where, in nearly half the states, more than half the people do not even believe in Darwinian evolution, let alone anthropogenic global warming, the states I like call the Benighted States of America. What to do if you live in the relatively intelligent part of the country?

Here’s what I tell my friends who agree that global warming is real and important: Don’t bother to argue with the ignorant, with the fools. The REAL questions, the questions that we should not fail to address, are “how much” and “when.”: To argue about “if” concedes the argument to the fools.

With respect to the Holocaust, does it matter if there were five million or seven million victims? Yes it does, to the victims and their families and friends. More broadly, it doesn’t: It was, after all, mass murder. But when it comes to global warming it matters whether the temperature increase will be one degree or two or three or four.And we should respect that, and deal with it in an honest way.

Since you live in the intelligent part of the country and you associate evolution and global warming belief, perhaps you should ask someone who lives there about the association fallacy. Anyone who lives in Massachusetts will do.

Someone please enlighten a non-native speaker: For me, the term “d…r” means “someone who d…s”. It does not indicate what is being d…d. How come the association with the Holocaust? What would be the proper term then, for someone who d…s the scientific body of evidence w. regard to something, e.g. climate change?

I am following the “climate science debate” since 2006. While I find “den1er” an unfortunate term, for completely different reasons, I am very sure that almost nobody who uses it to describe other people intends an association with “Holocaust-denier”. This association is only made by those on the receiving end. You are an exception. I am surprised, therefore the question.

Side-note: Germans tend to me very picky about “trivialization of the Holocaust”. Yet, “Klimaleugner” is common parlance even in the most respected newspapers and such an association is not made.

Side-note II: I would like to establish “trivializer” as replacement for “den1er”, since it includes the more despicable characters whose business isn’t “den1al” but rather “lobbying” and of course to get rid of this awful accusation (whatever direction).

From the many comments, not just this one by MikeH, it looks like I was wrong.

“Most people” might just be “some people”.

It might even be “a few completely misguided people such as myself”.

I started reading a lot about climate on climate blogs in about 2007 I think (I’ve always been interested in climate) – but I can’t remember the exact year.

From the beginning (and ever since), I have taken the ‘d..er’ term to be a smear association with holocaust denial – perhaps because that was the only place I had come across it being used.

Unlike my attempts to prove things like the “greenhouse” effect – using equations, arguments and experiments – I can’t “prove” any case for the use of this word.

I have read, but will be unable to find (and therefore prove), at least one case (and perhaps this was early on), on a “consensus climate science supporting blog” where someone supported the use of the term by way of reference to the Holocaust (as in, “this is just as bad, i.e., the same thing”).

Perhaps this was a complete outlier and not representative at all of the consensus climate science blog school of insults.

In moving countries a long time ago I was quite shocked hearing a sports team from a country described on the radio with a term that was clearly a racist epithet (where I had come from). It turned out that in my new location this was a term of endearment and not at all nasty. I’m still taken aback a little when I hear it now.

I use that by way of example, not analogy (‘d..r’ is not a term of endearment). Words can evoke different meanings to different people due to past experience.

Perhaps most people using the term ‘d..r’ are simply trying to say ‘you are denying basic science’ and would be horrified to find that most/some/a few recipients of said term associate it with people who deny the Holocaust took place.

If so, perhaps at least this article from an insignificant climate blog can encourage one thing.

Perhaps consensus climate science blogs can refrain from using the term because some people are still shocked when they hear it used.

Thanks for this relativization, SoD. I support you last sentence. If only very few people might honestly and spontaneously associate this term with that mass-murder (and now I believe there are such people), then it is just common decency to not use it — even if you believe that 99.9% of those complaining are just “playing the victim card”.

You were right in the first place, Steve. When climate activists call those with whom they disagree “science deniers” or “climate change deniers,” the purpose is denigration: to smear them by association with Holocaust deniers. That’s why the terms are so closely associated: a Google search for both TERMS returns 200k hits.

In my experience, most of the people who behave that way are uninterested in or incapable of understanding the relevant science and rationally defending their beliefs, so they resort to name-calling. Thank you for not being one of them.

The leading lights of climate science rejection do not deny the science because they do not understand it or it is too complicated, they deny it because they do not like the obvious solution – stop burning fossil fuels.

The pseudo-skeptic attack on climate science is a proxy for a political debate.

If global warming was caused by a **lack** of carbon dioxide in the air and the solution was to burn **more** carbon, very few of the climate science “skeptics” would still exist.

I try not to use the term “denier” because it just gives the pseudo-skeptics the opportunity to play the victim card. But in the years of following this debate, the only people who I have read associating the term climate denier with the holocaust is you above and the psuedo-skeptics themselves when they have run out of other arguments

I find many things troublesome about this kind or rationalisation, not least “playing the victim card”. It may be surprising for some to learn that I’ve sometimes been accused of this on so-called sceptical blogs, by fellow-sceptics. Here’s how I responded to such critics last year:

On a personal note, I have hated ‘denier’ and the holocaust denier allusion, from the first time I picked it up, with a passion. Please hear the next part particularly carefully. 90% of my disgust is about the fact that anyone using this rhetorical device clearly doesn’t give a damn about the real victims of the Holocaust. 10% is about its incredibly harmful effect on decent, intelligent public debate of climate, science and policy.

That’s why I so resent the idea that I am in any way trying to insinuate that we sceptics are victims on the same level as those that were tortured and killed in the real thing. No, we are the ones that care about those victims so much that we cannot stand for language to be abused in this way.

Like SoD my main focus has always been on the gross insult such language is to the memory of the real victims of the Shoah. I wasn’t the first to make this point. Here’s Matt Brooks responding to Al Gore’s 1992 book, Earth in the Balance:

For the vice president to equate the utter horror and the tremendous tragedy of Kristallnacht to try and invoke the passion of people about the environment is an insult to all the people who were victims of the Holocaust.

That’s quoted by Marc Sheppard in his useful history of this delusional and deceitful meme (as he puts it) in 2007. Seeking to squirm out by saying you mean less than Holocaust denial is less than convincing given the extend of this history and the dearth of examples of people like yourself calling out those in your own camp who have made the analogy absolutely explicit. See WUWT last year for some useful examples if you want to make a start in putting this right.

Lots of sceptics and lukewarmers disagreed with Tim Ball. Anthony Watts later expressed regret he had published Ball’s piece without editing. You’re not I’m sure using that as an excuse not to read every single example of explicit comparison with Holocaust d****l and deciding whether you’re going to speak out publicly against such abuse of language and of the victims of the Shoah. You wouldn’t just be playing games in such an important area, would you?

MikeH, I started out conditionally accepting the AGW position because many experts claimed it was so. However, I am a scientist, and looked in far more detail before I would accept it fully. I do not deny the basic science as stated by SOD and others. With me, the issue is how much the human burning of fossil fuel affects the net result, and what is the supporting evidence of consequences. I clearly am presently a skeptic of the claim that there is a bad effect from human burning of fossil fuels, and I clearly think we should not waste resources addressing a non-problem. I explain why in the following:
By looking back at all time scale where there was reasonable evidence, I concluded that natural variation can cause changes larger than the present variation, even over the last 10,000 years. In addition, the so called “normal” temperature reference level (the late 1800’s) was clearly at the tail end of an unusually cold period termed the Little Ice Age. It was in no way normal. It thus was difficult to sort out what was new, and what was natural variation. When the temperature rapidly rose from 1970 to 1998, it appeared there was a clear supporting evidence of the human effect. However, when it leveled out after that, the whole issue was upended. No model showed the flattening. Continual re-writing has been done to try to show the flattening was not out of the possible with the claimed AGW. However, if all of the data (1850-2015) is used rather than just 1970 to 1998, the slope of temperature increase is only about 0.4C per century. If the period from late 1930’s to present is used, the slope is about 0.4 C per century. Choosing a period to make the slope is arbitrary, and meaningless. These rates are also not useful. The basic problem is feedback from water vapor, and other causes. The water vapor increase also causes more low level clouds, which affect albedo. Ocean currents have long period changes which affect temperature. In fact, the storage/release system can change average air temperature over long periods with no change in other causes (solar insolation, AGW). In other words, the science can be correct, but not describe the temperature variation causes on long time scales. Since we likely are approaching the end of the present interglacial (the Holocene) even if we were to tend to warm, it likely would be good rather than bad. Also CO2 is plant food and the human caused increase has helped feed the world.

Looking at the Vostok ice core record, it seems we are overdue for a return to a glacial period. In the next 100 years, I believe the planet is as likely to cool down as it is to warm up. It’s a coin flip.

(I also believe evolution to be true, and Newtonian mechanics, and general relativity, and quantum electrodynamics. Global warming Armageddon is a politically motivated hyperbolic fantasy, born because “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!” just wasn’t cutting it anymore. ((“You’re all gonna die unless you wise up!” is a lot scarier, and therefore more effective politically, especially when targeted at schoolchildren and the unscientific masses.)) ).

I would suggest that you look at the rate of change in temperature for the 20th century vs the deglaciation from the last glacial. The rate of change now is 10-100 x greater. Also, there is a known forcing that is now approaching 3 W/m2. So, for temperature not to change you need to ascribe the stasis to a negative forcing. What is it?

This is pretty disappointing, SoD. Maybe you should spend some time looking at how Holocaust d…rs build their case. You’ll notice some striking similarities. Or hey, for something a little more current try the anti-vaxxers.

Or perhaps have a look at the extensive scientific literature on d…ism, which dates back to before the Holocaust. Which leads me to ask why you’re censoring an accepted scientific term.

Re AGW, we got pictures! Try the Chasing Ice video for starters.

See, not so hard.

But I know you love your equations. 🙂

Just to say, I never need to resort to that sort of material when explaining AGW, and I explain it to a lot of people. It’s almost as if the tl;dr approach you laid out above is some sort of straw man.

“This is pretty disappointing, SoD. Maybe you should spend some time looking at how Holocaust d…rs build their case. You’ll notice some striking similarities. Or hey, for something a little more current try the anti-vaxxers.”

The issue isnt how one builds a case. There are fixed forms and modes of skepticism. A cookbook if you like.
Any claim to knowledge can be attacked using that cookbook.

There is nothing unique about the cookbook
The similarity exists across ALL challenges to any knowledge whatsoever.

What you would have to show is that there is something unique in the strategy and tactics of folks who attack the holocaust and the tactics of those who
attack climate science.

Well said. The emptiness of this aspect of the argument reminds me of a moment in a debate I attended organised by The Times in London over ten years ago. No need to give context except to say that a black man in the audience used what I thought was a helpful analogy in support of one of the speakers, who was Jewish. Another person at the front at once said, with a rather dismissive smirk on his face, “You have to be very careful with that analogy, because the Nazis used it.” At once the Jewish guy shot back “The Nazis also drove cars. Does that mean we can’t use cars?”

Just because you find some commonality between the mode of argument used by those that doubt the reality of the Holocaust and those who doubt any aspect of the IPCC credo, such as the output of GCMs, doesn’t mean equivalence morally. One view is utterly repugnant as well as being provably wrong. Don’t ignore this reality. It will do you great harm to do so.

There is also a “cookbook” for doing science. “…as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts”. Unfortunately, the author of this passage thought he and his peers could descend into the adversarial arena of politics and law, shut off all debate by citing a psuedo-consensus, and not be corrupted by the process.

It’s a curious old thing, but d…. of the Holocaust is basically any attempt to claim that it didn’t take place. It is also seen as an expression of antisemitism and an attempt to exonerate the Nazi often in an attempt to promote similar ideologies (ref. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance).

Now on that basis d…. of Climate Change must be any attempt to claim that the climate doesn’t change. At a literal level it would be difficult to find anyone who would hold that view, willfully or otherwise. So Climate Change d…. is not a use of the term as defined in the literature (scientific or otherwise). It is used as a polemic so it brings in the associations of its use with the Holocaust.

In fact what is typically d…ed is that the evidence on the human contribution is sufficient to justify very significant changes in the way the humans use the earth’s resources. By doing this the accusation by way of analogy is that the d….s attempt to exonerate the use of those resources and seek to promote the ideologies that allow it.

I very much doubt that this extension of the analogy holds, most so-called d…s recognise it is debate over evidence and wouldn’t deny that some evidence exists. So again even if confined to the correct definition of what is being d…ed the word is being used as a polemic.

The correct scientific characterisation: “d…ing that the evidence on the human contribution is sufficient to justify very significant changes in the way the humans use the earth’s resources” lacks the snappiness required for political debate and also suffers because it makes it clear it is a debate about scientific evidence and risk management.

Worst of all for those who use the current term it doesn’t bring with it the implication that those that hold that view are doing it to support the willful and wholesale slaughter of innocent people.

I would only add that among people who can grapple with the equations, the de..ialsm is more accurately characterized as skepticism about specific parts of calculations done by GCMs, in particular the broad uncertainty in certain parameterized variables which amplify the basic GHG driven warming by a large factor, and the inability of GCMs to generate realistic temporal variability. People who work in technology (in other complicated subject areas) really do understand the potential impacts of imperfect knowledge on modeled projections…. and many technically capable people are quite skeptical of GCM projections. This is not a coincidence, nor a surprise.

To argue that particular words should not be used (especially) when that word accurately describes someone’s actions, and is a common, well-used word doesn’t seem to be useful. The word has a history beyond the Holocaust. It is also fairly well-defined

It’s also difficult to have a discussion about the use of the word in this context as basically you are effectively condemning those who are using a well-defined word as equating Climate Change D for Holocaust D. There’s not much space in here for discussion…

I also belief that it is unjustified to call a skeptic (climate or otherwise) a denier but this is nothing to do with the holocaust. One can be a denier of many things and there is no doubt that there are climate deniers (for lack of a better word). If one can argue inconsistent arguments simultaneously then what word would you use to describe them?. It certainly cant be a skeptic. We have all come across those that will argue inconsistencies such as…CO2 is not rising, then CO2 is rising very fast but temperatures are not, then the oceans are not absorbing CO2 in one discussion on ocean acidity then CO2 will readily all be absorbed into the oceans when discussing life times,It is impossible to predict future temperatures, there is globing cooling on the way etc. There seems to be many people who argue like this. Surely the best word for that kind of inconsistency is denial, and this is not scientific skepticism which is essential.

Do you have an example where someone who questioned the equations and their function was called the d-word?
Because what you describe sounds like skepticism; I would be surprised if they were labelled a D, for that.

Well there is this little gem frm MikeH above:
“I try not to use the term “denier” because it just gives the pseudo-skeptics the opportunity to play the victim card. But in the years of following this debate, the only people who I have read associating the term climate denier with the holocaust is you above and the psuedo-skeptics themselves when they have run out of other arguments.”

See, it’s obvious no one could ever be honestly skeptical. The starting assumption is that all who doubt do so in bad faith. This is a losing argument when your opponent is actually acting in good faith… I can’t think of a better way to piss people off and make them doubt you even more.

Nathan – why would common Spanish have to adapt following the evolution of the N word in English? (same in Italian). Because…if you want to talk to people, there is absolutely no reason to insult them. And the fact that a word sounds insulting in a communication is established by both parties in the communication.

It happened to me. None other thanBBD who can be very nasty and dead wrong. He said I was a coal industry Lobbyist and a deni##. Of course that was a lie. However stupidity should not automatically be attributed to malice, especially for layman activists who think Hadrians wall is a boundary value.

Now, now, David. Let’s not get carried away. IIRC you were making big claims about your publication record which strangely doesn’t seem to exist. I only asked you *if* you were the same David Young who is a coal industry lobbyist and you said you weren’t. And that was the end of the matter. I’m very disappointed to see you misrepresenting our previous conversations here at SoD.

My record is public. If you missed it you aren’t trying. You have been too lazy to find it. I won’t go back to Keith’s thread as it is nasty to quote it as you know full well you are either lying about it or have whitewashed it in your own small mind. What I said is true.

Just for the record, one could try AIAA Journal, Vol 52, Issue 8, pg.1699, 2014. That one refers to numerous earlier works. Why are some particularly nasty climate activists so quick to assume incompetence when they disagree with someone? Especially poignant when the activist is largely ignorant of the scientific details despite having “read” some papers. Doubly poignant when the nasty activist is too lazy to do any effective research.

I was looking for a David’s “real publication record of relevance to climate” (his exact words).

I didn’t find one. Perhaps DY overstates the relevance to climate.

I was looking for it because DY was parroting McIntyre’s hit-job on Marcott et al. (2013) and I pointed out that he was mistaken. During the conversation, David referred to me (amongst other things) as “Blah Blah Duh, generalissimo and propaganda minister”.

Perhaps DY might do better if he recognised that his own behaviour is the key to way others react to him.

BBD, Activist largely ignorant of science calls scientist names and accuses the scientist of being a coal industry lobbyist. Activist dismisses accurate scientific statements as denial. Activist thinks perhaps that fluid dynamics is not relevant to climate. And the activist, largely ignorant of science, expects to be treated with respect. Activist should apologize but is too lazy or self-righteous.

The real bottom line on Marcott et al is that what is correct is not new and what is new is not correct. So why all the flawed press coverage and Shankun’s seeming ignorance of the ice core record? It is all rather pathetic and shabby. It would never be allowed in a top flight medical or engineering journal.

You then proceeded to parrot McIntyre’s *incorrect* criticism of that study. In response, I corrected your second-hand misrepresentations. I then asked you to show what was ‘not correct’ in M13 and you were unable to do so. Throughout the process you were consistently offensive. You are in no position to fulminate about name-calling. Show some self-awareness for once.

Activist should apologize but is too lazy or self-righteous.

What activist would that be, David? The one who spends so much time on the internet braying that the models are wrong? The one who tried to ‘educate’ Gavin Schmidt on this topic? Did I mention self-awareness?

Did you read what I wrote above? You haven’t contradicted or responded to a single assertion of fact. That is because my assertions above are truthful. Yours would seem to be trying to change the subject. You are largely ignorant of science and have no idea whether what I sent to Schmidt is right or wrong. It is by the way right.

Your pathetic response is the best you can do? Schmidt knows more about somethings and I know more about others. Real human beings have a complex and honest life that involves constant learning. The ignorant can only snipe and divert attention to irrelevancies.

Since you’re so fond of decrying logical fallacies: Appealing to authority is one too. Whether David Young knows as much as Gavin Schmidt about climate models is irrelevant to whether he is correct or not.

DeWitt, The problem here is ignorance that GCM’s are largely fluid dynamics with complex subgrid models. If you don’t know that then you make all sorts of silly errors. If you are arrogant you refuse to admit any of them of course.

Schmidt does know that of course, but not a lot about finite elements or the missing term in Reynolds averaging. That’s OK, no one knows every detail. Some know none of the details though.

Yes Steven, It was a little humorous. Since that time, we have gotten a lot further in this line of research and there is some documentation in the literature of the amazing prevalence of multiple solutions. I now believe that Schmidt’s statements about climate models are due to the fact that they employ a lot of dissipation to stabilize their schemes. This dissipation is deadly to accuracy and we are finding more and more evidence of this. BBD is indeed totally ignorant of these facts of course and incapable of even participating in the conversation except to denigrate and divert. He is a pathetic example of how politicized this field has become.

The most important peel, the equations in the NCAR model reference depict not the simple concept of radiative forcing but of atmospheric motion. This serves as a great reminder that the amount of energy emitted to space is a function not only of the well mixed constituents but also of unpredictable fluid flow. The simple concept is incorrect at least by being incomplete.

The difficulty lies not with the number or complexity of the equations of motion, but with the non-linearity – we know going into this exercise that linear numerical solutions to non-linear problems are incorrect.

The failings of the applied atmospheric dynamics is is borne out by the missing tropical upper tropospheric hot spot. The hot spot is predicted by gcms for heating, not just heating from CO2 increase. The hot spot is not observed. This represents a failing in the models regarding how energy is convected and so, radiated to space.

The holocaust, of course, is a past event, not a prediction of a future event.

Juxtaposing genocide with carbon dioxide is an appeal to emotion of a false moral equivalence. Even if one can demonstrate ‘inevitable’ temperature rise, demonstrating greater harm than good ( which tends to be removed from the conversation ) is even more tenuous.

“Once people have seen the unprecedented rise in temperature this century, how could they not align themselves with the forces of good?” – Hah! Beyond the further appeal to emotion ‘forces of good’ – the temperature trend displayed indicates a temperature trend from 1910-1945 quite similar to the 1979-present.
To be sure, CO2 forcing was positive during that period, but much less than recent trend. The recent trend is very much precedented. Evidently, also precedented was Arctic sea ice loss as evidenced by the Arctic temperature finger print ( winter warming, summer stasis ) that occurred in the early twentieth century.

Finally, the Nazi analogy is a reminder that bad things can happen when people acquiesce to central governments crusading for good. The Nazis were crusading for the glory of the Reich and justified genocide for the cause. After all, it was simple and obvious to them that aryans were superior and the Reich would last a thousand years. To be sure, genocide and property rights are not equivalent. But should citizens have property confiscated simply because a government declares that they are saving the planet?

One can make a legitimate argument that (let me think of another word for “climate science denier”) …. “those who are pushing private interests above the common good, via deliberately misleading others about the results borne from climate science” are far worse than the Nazis ever were. The future of the entire human species is, by definition, infinitely more important than anything that has ever happened to any subset of the human species.

/not trying to make the Holocaust sound ‘less awful’; it was horrifying

One can make a legitimate argument that … “those who are pushing private interests above the common good, via deliberately misleading others about the results borne from climate science” are far worse than the Nazis ever were.

I deeply disagree. And I mean even if the human race ceases to be in the near future, for reasons I began to explore on 15th February. SoD’s instinct that this is a category error of the vilest kind holds right the way down the line.

I do find it amusing that Richard Tol is incapable of detecting the sarcastic tone SoD is applying in this post.

It does take some experience with scientific analysis to understand either the theoretical or observational evidence for the greenhouse effect and other aspects of climate change. It’s not something that can be made bleedingly obvious to the lay person, and for most people that means accepting the science requires some form of belief, trust, faith, rather than personal knowledge. I think that’s SoD’s point here. But the same is true of much of science and even technology – evolutionary biology, relativity, elementary particles, atoms, lasers, electronic circuits, etc. Do we have a right to be disparaging towards those who don’t trust scientists on one or more of these things? What would actually work?

I have much respect for your blog, enjoy reading your reviews of the science, whether or not it seems in line with the mainstream, and have on occasion referred to you as a great demonstration of what true scepticism entails.

But on this post I feel you are terribly, horribly, wrong when you say:

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘d*nier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

Denial has long, common and respectable usage not at all associated with the holocaust in any way (at least in the UK, perhaps it is different elsewhere?).

It is used in describing grief, and the same language and model is also used in business change:

The Kübler-Ross model, or the five stages of grief, is a series of emotional stages experienced when faced with impending death or death of someone. The five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

The Kubler-Ross model was published in 1969. No-one accused Elizabeth Kubler Ross of comparing people in grief to N*zis.

The term was supposedly originated by Freud as:

a psychological defense mechanism postulated by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.

(quotes from Wiki)

Personally, I feel to accuse anyone using the term “d*nier” in its general usage as conflating their target with Holocaust perpetrators is in very poor taste.

Many of those who challenge the science of global warming are truly in denial, in the sense put forward by Freud, being unable to reconcile their own political and economic values with the simple facts of a world warming by human hand.

Personally, I feel to accuse anyone using the term “d*nier” in its normal usage as conflating their target with Holocaust perpetrators is in very poor taste.

You should rethink your position. Saying that someone is in denial about climate change is not the same as saying that anyone who does not agree that any climate change is going to be catastrophic and that (sarc) we should all go back to being hunter-gatherers (/sarc) is a climate change d****r. Words and phrases often have semantic connotations beyond the dictionary definitions. I find it difficult to believe that many of those who use that phrase are not aware of that particular connotation and intend it to be taken exactly that way.

Being in denial in the Kubler-Ross sense also implies that you are actually aware on some level that you’re wrong. I doubt that’s true of most of the people who have been labeled as d….rs.

Yes, getting a tad more linguistic about it, we’re not looking for denial on its own or the interesting phrase “in denial” but terms of the form “[abstract noun] denial” and “[abstract noun] denier”. That form began with Holocaust denial and denier in the English-speaking world. Here’s a useful summary from Bishop Hill contributor in 2010:

I am a psychologist, and the term “denier” is not a psychological term. It first came into use in the late 1960’s in relation to the WWII Holocaust. As hro001 demonstrated above, it is an emotion-packed term. And as he points out, it generally means “politically motivated falsifaction [sic] of history”

All the references you give come from the 1990’s and later, and clearly derived from the earlier use, typically for the emotional impact.

The term “denial” as in “he is in denial” is a psychological term. I have no idea who used it first, but it is very, very old. I think Freud used it, but I read the English translations of his work so I don’t know the German word he used. It is typically used in the sense of refusing to accept reality.

So SoD’s right to take climate denier and its cognates the way he does. Some of the blindness on this is I fear willful but, much worse, entails a significant insult to the memory the victims of the real thing. Surely much better, on this of all aspects of the climate debate, to play it safe.

I find it difficult to believe that many of those who use that phrase are not aware of that particular connotation and intend it to be taken exactly that way.

I disagree. Completely.

This is phraseology commonly used with no connotation whatsoever for the holocaust

recent examples in from a simple google news search:

The Guardian on Rotherham Council

Instead, I found a council in denial. They denied that there had been a problem, or if there had been, that it was as big as was said. If there was a problem they certainly were not told – it was someone else’s job. They were no worse than anyone else. They had won awards. The media were out to get them.

WSJ on Thailand

Thailand’s Dictators in Denial
The junta takes a harder line against popular politicians.

SportsJoe(!):

LIVERPOOL FAN IN DENIAL TRIES TO PROVE THAT MARIO BALOTELLI IS A REAL GRAFTER

No, none of them are and none of us are saying that. We’re looking for something of the form “[abstract noun] d****l”. Plus explicit references to the Holocaust as people do, which are many in this case. Please see my comment preceding yours.

There’s no doubt the pattern I’ve described has begun to be used elsewhere. I also spotted deficit d****rs, indeed I made it an entry in my personal wiki on 20th August 2010. I’m that much of a word nerd. Most of the time that stuff us simply fun. The case of Climate D***** sadly isn’t.

Because if you think that this later one-off usage (people have also mentioned AIDS d*****) is enough to wipe off the map all the examples of explicit comparison with Holocaust D****l, starting with Deborah Tannen on Jim Lehrer’s Newshour in 1998, and the fact that when Climate D***** and its variants became really trendy, around 2007, the Holocaust variant of the meme was the only other game in town and thus obviously intended as an allusion, you are clutching at anachronistic straws. Why this great felt need to be defensive? Do those that deploy this phrase not care that if they are wrong their usage has among other things served to trivialise and minimise one of the most heinous crimes in history?

Since we all agree the word can be used innocently and interpreted not so innocently, can those using the word innocently not find a better method to communicate their true intent? It’s hard to believe that people don’t understand this word is loaded.

Toms point is telling. You should use terminology that is not loaded unless your purpose is to denigrate and insult. Those who use the d word do so knowing it will intimidate some into silence and is insulting to many.

I’m just curious to know what you are seeking to communicate when you refer to a “Climate Change D…..”.

I’ve just commented above on what I think the correct characterisation of the general position of those who get labeled this way and suggest it has nothing to do with the way the word is used in your examples above.

In particular your opinion that Freud’s definition applies relies on your reframing of what the debate is about. In Freud’s terms you are perhaps in d..al because you cannot reconcile your beliefs with the reality of an uncertain world (as it were).

IMHO the d word is only useful in this debate to allow the user to imply guilt by association, and it needs to be called out for that.

I wasn’t trying to promote or even defend the use of the d-word, merely to point out that it has nothing to do with the holocaust.

I think it is absolutely most commonly used in Freud’s meaning – when facts awkward to an individual’s world view are simply denied.

For example here’s James Inhofe

my point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.

Don’t know about you, but I’d describe that as outright denial, in the Freudian sense.

Also, if you’re looking for a suitable target for your outrage over allusions to the activities of the Nazis, Inhofe might be a good place for you to start, rather than the somewhat innocuous “Climate Change Den1er”.

Here he is comparing his opponents to, amongst other things, the Gestapo and the Third Reich, the latter specifically on global warming.

The point is that you need to go back to what is being d..ed. As I noted elsewhere using the mainstream view (d..ing the science is good enough to justify drastic action) Freud has no place – it is quite a reasonable position and in fact those who are adamant that the science is good enough (come h.ll or high water) are at risk of being in d..al over the extent of uncertainty in nature.

I suspect that the difference between Inhofe and those that refer to Climate Change d..ers is that he would go on to justify the analogy to the Gestapo while the latter seem to insist that no comparison with Nazi was intended (but perhaps a smear by way of psychological diagnosis was).

I think the debate is better served by admitting the connotation in the d..er word, acknowledging that some (like Inhofe on the other side) have introduced it into the debate for that purpose, and stop using it.

(Re-post. This got caught in moderation upthread because I forgot to edit the d- word in the quoted text.)

SoD

Count me with the others here who suggest that you have been conned by the re-definers of language who describe themselves as ‘sceptics’.

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘d_nier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

That interpretation was created by language re-definers (self-describing as ‘sceptics’, remember) who are highly adept at playing the victim for tactical advantage.

It is THEY who are guilty of what you write, not someone using the word d_nier to mean exactly what is says: someone in d_nial.

The victim card is mostly poking the left with their own stick for entertainment purposes and nothing more. The left is hyper-sensitive to terminology when it comes to issues such as race relations, so the use of this term doesn’t live up to their own moral standards. I don’t think too many tears are really shed here.

Reminds me of Republicans calling the Democratic Party the Democrat Party. The Democratic Party picked it’s name in the 1840s or so. The Republicans turn the word Democrat into a pejorative. Imagine Democrats calling the Republican Party the Republic Party.

Wrong. It is AGW alarmist crowd who have defined the “D” word when used in relation to the climate change debate. The “D” word is used to denigrate those skeptical of the science of global warming, and to assign them the same moral repugnance as those who d*ny the Holocaust. Here is a list of well know people who have defined the term along with their statements:

==> “I’ve been a student of history for a long time and have read quite a bit about Nazi Germany and WWII. …It’s heartbreaking to read about the war and to read about the Holocaust. Words fail me to describe the awfulness of that regime and what they did.”

What is the point of this rhetorical flourish? To suggest that knowledge about, and sadness about, mass murder somehow reflects an inherently causal explanation for “concern” about the use of the D word in the climate wars?

Would the same logic apply for the ubiquitous comparisons of “realists” to Lysenko or Stalin or Pol Pot or McCarthy or Eugenicists or Mao or N*zis or eugenicists of my newest favorite Genghis Kahn?

In fact, I think that the overly-dramatic “outrage, outrage I say” about the use of the D word amounts to exploitation of a serious issue – holocaust D..ial – to score points in the climate wars.

None of this “concern” about the D word has anything to do with the science and, IMO, is no better than the similarly exploitative arguments that I often see from “realists”: That the D word has an authoritative and objective definition (that doesn’t include a connotation holocaust D..ial). No one actually knows the intent of someone using the D word unless the labeler stated their intent, and no one actually knows the interpreted meaning by those so labeled, except the person doing the interpretation. And from both sides, the chances are the labeler and labelee will filter their impressions through the partisan screen of the climate Jell-O fight.

IMO, the drama-queening from “skeptics” about the use of the term is pretty much equally matched from “realists” that if they don’t use the term their letting the Ders “define language.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that these discussions exchanging the same opinions happen over and over in thread after thread, with no meaningful or measurable outcome (that I can see, at least) except that perhaps people on both sides (and the same characters that bicker about this issue in blog thread after blog thread) might just be a smidgen more entrenched in their own sense of victimhoood

There are category errors all over this. SoD is objecting to d****r and its cognates as totally inappropriate to the science of atmospheric physics. Climate policy as currently conceived can hand significant powers to government – unelected power in the case of the EPA in the USA, from what I’ve read here in the olde country, for example. Or it can lead to crony capitalism as wealthy landowners in Britain get zero-risk handouts for allowing wind turbines to despoil our shared environment. If one has concerns about unelected power or crony capitalism one is perfectly entitled to reach into history and spot some warnings there. Politicised science is another legitimate issue and those of us concerned about it are bound to head for Lysenko or the eugenicists up to 1945. These can never be proofs of what’s happening now but they are legitimate places to go for warnings. What SoD is rightly objecting to is the Holocaust d****l analogy being applied to the science, as it so often is. Why can’t we agree on this most obvious of points?

90% of my disgust is about the fact that anyone using this rhetorical device clearly doesn’t give a damn about the real victims of the Holocaust.

[…]

No, we are the ones that care about those victims so much that we cannot stand for language to be abused in this way.

I think that is a very obvious overstatement, founded on fallacious reasoning. In fact, you have no logical basis on which to assert that: (1) anyone using the term “doesn’t give a damn about the real victims of the holocaust,” and (2) “skeptics” as a group “care more about those victims” than “realists” as a group.

But what’s further is that you add these elements:

10% is about its incredibly harmful effect on decent, intelligent public debate of climate, science and policy.

First, you have no way of determining the impact on “intelligent public debate” of the use of that term. None. For example, how could you possibly distinguish it from the impact of so many other pejoratives sprinkled around liberally from “skeptics?” How could you distinguish he impact of that term from the polarizing politicization related to the policy implications of climate change policy? Do you really think that someone pimarily interested in “decent, intelligence public debate” would be unable to get past the use of the D-word, and to be rendered thus incapable of reasoned exchange of view?

And then you will go on to try to legitimize the comparisons to Lysenkoism (where people were imprisoned and executed) or eugenicists (whose racism laid the groundwork for the racism of Nazism), even as you decry the massive hard resulting from hyperbolic rhetoric on the part of “realists?”

Sorry, but IMO, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I don’t defend the use of the term. I think that it’s in balance counterproductive, and I think that the argument that somehow the term is necessary in order to make progress, or that in not using the term a “realist” would be relinquishing ground and handing “skeptics” some kind of language-definition victory, are also fallacious. I see no advantage to be gained from using the term.

The term, even if used as some “realists” say that they intend it’s meaning – to suggest that “skeptics” are “in d..ial” – is basically, IMO, based on fallacious reasoning.

In my interpretation, the term essentially means that someone won’t admit openly something that they know at a deeper level to be true – perhaps because of inability to face their true feelings or perhaps because they are “motivated” by self-interest or some other goal they won’t own up to in good faith.

My sense is that most “skeptics” fully believe their arguments to be true, just as do “realists.” I think that calling them the D-word is making an argument without evidence (judging someone’s psychology or motivations without actually knowing enough about them).

And BTW – I see “skeptics” using the D-word quite a bit these days in the “skept-o-sphere” to refer to “realists,” and I have yet to see one “skeptic” jumping up to express their outrage, outrage I say.

Sceptic is just a label, one that Richard Lindzen dislikes because he thinks it implies the ‘consensus position’ we are deemed to doubt is so muddled as to not deserve this level of credence! But he’s surely talking there about dubious claimed consensus across atmospheric science, particularly high-sensitivity enhanced greenhouse, posited impacts and the appropriate policy responses. We’ll never find a label that everyone thinks is strictly correct etymologically. What this thread is about is a wholly inappropriate analogy coming in on the back of climate change d****r. If everyone agreed to eliminating that usage we’d be behaving more like compassionate human beings and that cannot but affect all aspects of a very important debate.

Sadly the link to the tobacco industry is not an analogy, but a reality. Think Heartland, US Chamber of Commerce, S. Fred Singer and a whole bunch of libertarian economists just for a start. All paid for and delivered to by Big Tobacco.

In my interpretation, the term essentially means that someone won’t admit openly something that they know at a deeper level to be true – perhaps because of inability to face their true feelings or perhaps because they are “motivated” by self-interest or some other goal they won’t own up to in good faith.

Joshua’s interpretation accords with my own.

It’s one thing to point to unanswered scientific questions at levels of detail below “Earth’s climate has warmed at about 0.17 +/- 0.04 degrees C/per decade for the last 40 years, mostly if not entirely due to anthropogenic Tyndall-gas emissions, and if it’s allowed to continue many people will experience impacts they will regard as catastrophic”. Recognizing uncertainly in the details (Is ECS closer to 2 or 3 degreesC per CO2 doubling? Is the feedback by clouds negative or positive? Will the eventual cost of AGW be $12 trillion or $120 trillion?) is correctly called skepticism.

It’s another thing altogether, to reject the lopsided consensus of working, publishing climate scientists in favor of sciency-sounding mumbo-jumbo, conspiracy theories, arguments from consequences, or the deacon’s grace (“Lord, bless me and my wife, son John and his wife, we four and no more”). That is correctly called denial.

Joshua:

My sense is that most “skeptics” fully believe their arguments to be true, just as do “realists.” I think that calling them the D-word is making an argument without evidence (judging someone’s psychology or motivations without actually knowing enough about them).

While some AGW-deniers may “fully believe their arguments to be true, just as do realists”, realists have science on their side. An AGW-denier’s motivation isn’t important to me. They may be unwilling to recognize that climate change is a cost of fossil-fuel consumption they haven’t been paying, and succumb the Dunning-Kruger effect, convinced that their illusory scientific competence allows them to dismiss genuine expertise; they may not think scientifically at all, but allow their political or cultural identities to inform their opinions; they may be professional disinformers, paid to keep the costs of climate change external to the price of oil by keeping the public confused. Joshua’s interpretation of the term “denier”, quoted above, covers all of them.

BTW, none of the AGW-deniers I’ve encountered have given any indication that they deny the Nazi campaign of genocide again Jews. On that evidence, the intersection of the set of AGW-deniers with the set of Holocaust-deniers is empty. The claim that “AGW-denier” must imply “Holocaust-denier” is refuted thus.

Joshua:

I don’t defend the use of the term. I think that it’s in balance counterproductive, and I think that the argument that somehow the term is necessary in order to make progress, or that in not using the term a “realist” would be relinquishing ground and handing “skeptics” some kind of language-definition victory, are also fallacious. I see no advantage to be gained from using the term.

I’m personally less concerned about making “progress” than I am about epistemic honesty. In common English usage and even more so in the specialized vocabulary of Psychology, the term “AGW-denier” concisely denotes someone who rejects any of the three propositions I listed in my first comment and reiterated here. If they don’t want to be called deniers, they can stop denying AGW.

OTOH, I am also determined not to “relinquish ground” by allowing AGW-deniers to claim mastery of the dictionary or the debate. The arbitrary, absolute conflation of “denier” with “Holocaust” is nothing more than a rhetorical tactic, and I won’t accede to it.

The claim that “AGW-denier” must imply “Holocaust-denier” is refuted thus.

A claim nobody has made and a suggestive mistake.

What SoD and those like myself who have supported him have asserted is that any comparison with, or implied equivalence with, Holocaust d****r is repugnant. Some angrily argue that the comparison is not entailed by the innocent word d****r – an argument to which I will return on another occasion. But the empty set intersection you say you’ve discovered proves nothing. We could be just as evil and unwilling to face horrific facts as Holocaust d****rs without actually being Holocaust d****rs. It is that sly allusion SoD is arguing against and for exactly the right reasons: because it trivialises the suffering of the victims of the real thing.

Before coming back to the question of whether d****r always, sometimes or never implies the equivalence, I’d like to say I welcome the distance those that support urgent action to counter the dangers they perceive in AGW have been so keen put between their language and pernicious trivialisation of the Holocaust. They haven’t thanked SoD for it but it’s a very valuable thing he’s made them do.

Just to be clear…your rhetoric looks to me like a gambit that is saying that your view on the use of the term “denier” is a direct outgrowth of knowledge of and concern about the holocaust. I don’t doubt the sincerity of your views on the holocaust, but obviously it is quite possible to know and be concerned about the holocaust and still not be concerned about the use of “denier” in the climate wars.

Just to be clear…your rhetoric looks to me like a gambit that is saying that your view on the use of the term “d..ier” is a direct outgrowth of knowledge of and concern about the holocaust. I don’t doubt the sincerity of your views on the holocaust, but obviously it is quite possible to know and be concerned about the holocaust and still not be concerned about the use of “d..ier” in the climate wars. Suggesting otherwise looks exploitative to me.

==> “Words and phrases often have semantic connotations beyond the dictionary definitions.”

I think that you carry that too far here:

==> “I find it difficult to believe that many of those who use that phrase are not aware of that particular connotation and intend it to be taken exactly that way.”

An argument from incredulity?

You don’t know their intent. Why would you find it hard to believe that they might not intend the the use of the term to be any way other than your interpretation? You are turning your own statement upside down – you don’t know their intended semantic connotation.

IMO, is is clear that term is generally viewed as a pejorative and not as a descriptive term, but the connotation of “holocaust d..ial” is far from clear, and the interpretation as a pejorative is no different than the use of “alarmist” or “Lysenkoist” from many of the same players who claim concern about the putative “holocaust d..er” connotation of the D word.

Sorry – but IMO, when someone who claims concern about the D-word then turns around and uses pejorative labels with similar connotations, and like the “realists” then says in defense that they only use the term because it is accurately descriptive – I am not particularly moved.

“You don’t know their intent. Why would you find it hard to believe that they might not intend the the use of the term to be any way other than your interpretation? You are turning your own statement upside down – you don’t know their intended semantic connotation.”

when I say the N word with an “a” at the end its my intention to sound cool.

The d word is clearly a term meant to insult and draw on the associations with Holocaust denial. A scientific term? Perhaps a pseudo scientific term used by shameless activists to try to get people to censor themselves. Activists who don’t hesitate to misrepresent their own motivations and actions. You know psychological science is particularly subject to cultural prejudice.

Don’t go on a college campus in the US today thinking that the labelled one isn’t allowed to define the meaning of the label, take offense and file a formal complaint. Current campus speech codes, which I think are atrocious, do exactly that.

And it wasn’t an argument from incredulity. It was an opinion. I’m not trying to prove anything.

SOD: great post. But I think you’re half-hitting, half-missing the point.

I’ve been in quite a few arguments about AGW lately with friends and groups on Facebook. Some of these are old debate partners, so I know where they stand on the issue, and I know I have no hope of convincing them, so I’ve moved on to better understanding their epistemology, their reasoning behind why they believe what they believe. There’s more going on than just not understanding the science.

Here’s the point: most of us don’t understand the science of most fields. Why doubt this field? Why doubt the scientific result of *any* field, for that matter, if you lack expertise there?

The “skeptics” tend to have a few traits in common:
1a) Fiercely independent. Their default is to distrust and view suspiciously subjects they don’t understand for themselves.
1b) They tend to have more belief in their own competence, rather than doubting their own competence/knowledge and giving the scientists the benefit of the doubt.
2) They tend to be ideologically opposed to the perceived consequences of AGW: more government involvement.

1b is a reason I see a lot fewer full-time scientists who reject AGW. If you’ve gotten a PhD, you usually realize just how little you actually knew about your own field before hand, and by analogy, how little you know about other fields. You realize the depth of your incompetence. So you know that you can’t critically analyze the claims of those fields without a helluva lot of work – unless, of course, that most of the scientists in that field are just idiots, which would be a rather bold stance to take. More likely, if a result looks obviously bad, you don’t actually understand it well. In my experience, when I dig into the subject, this tends to be verified.

This attitude is not what I normally see from the AGW skeptics. Rather, it’s the precise opposite: “the scientists are idiots, and I’m easily able to pick apart the flaws in their work”.

The point is that *none* of us are able to actually fully study and critically analyze all of the sub-fields of climate science. We lack the time and expertise. So the question becomes “what’s your default stance?” Is it one of incredulity, or that the scientists know what they’re talking about?

I’m an “alarmist”, not because I believe that climate scientists have exhaustively explored every single possibility that could refute AGW, but because I can grasp the basic science, and because most of the “debunkings” that I see from skeptics don’t look very solid. Which tells you that my default stance is somewhere between agnosticism and trusting the scientists.

TL;DR: When it’s too hard to show people “proof” that they can really grok, they tend to fall back to some sort of default stance, predicated by other positions.

Most of this blog is dealing with people confused about the basics. Many of them are fully convinced they have a firm grasp of the subject. I agree with you. I find it hilarious.

Still, many people want to understand the strength of a position. I think that’s why the IPCC reports exist – instead of a 1 page press release, saying “we know what we are doing” they wrote quite a lot (must be a few thousand pages in WG1). And that’s a good thing.

If you take any field, the experts are going to understand the subject way better than you and me. Of course.

But – and here’s the small fly in the ointment – if they are extremely convinced of something, does it mean it is true?

I could take economics as an example. Nate Silver does a great job in his book, The Signal and the Noise, which I recommend, of comparing economists forecasts with reality (among other topics). The forecasts, and the uncertainty around the forecast provided by economists, do not compare well with reality.

How can Nate Silver be so arrogant – he’s not an economist – to compare economists predictions and uncertainty calculations with reality? What does he know about economics?

But many people are interested in the result. Economics and climate are both important in our future. And it’s not just “skeptics” who are over-confident in their ability.

That doesn’t mean I believe climate scientists are “wrong” or that “skeptics” are right. I refer you to all the other articles in this blog for demonstration of this. I’m very impressed with most climate science work.

When I look at something like say paleoclimate they are truly (literally and figuratively) digging under every rock looking for new evidence and looking for ways to check previous calculations and estimates.

I started this blog because I’m interested in climate, because I have questions that I wanted to research, and because so many people have legitimate* questions – but are insulted instead of answered on blogs where people do know physics.

Although to be fair it’s only after they commit the cardinal sin of questioning the answer, or of generally not accepting the “right” answer at face value first time when they get insulted.

Oh sorry, I thought this was the climate blog.
No, this is the insulting room, down the hall, 3rd left.
– Monty Python allusion.. for fans.

[* legitimate = it’s a reasonable question to ask even if the answer is already published in a journal and not in doubt, even if the answer is already clear for 100 years in textbooks and not in doubt].

+1. I’ve had the issues of epistemology on my mind a lot lately, so I read your post in light of that, and ignored all the d-word stuff (which I personally don’t really care about).

But – and here’s the small fly in the ointment – if they are extremely convinced of something, does it mean it is true?

Of course the answer is “it depends”. If I want to judge the results in another field, I look to how rigorous the methodologies are that underlie the expert’s opinions, and I see how well they can falsify alternative hypotheses and remove the effects of confounding factors. Fields where these are harder to do tend to progress more slowly (e.g., economics or medicine).

Repeatibility is another aspect of trust, of course. I might trust a verified study of the effect of some drug on rats, more than a non-verified study of the drug’s effect on humans.

But ideally, all of these issues should factor into the experts’ confidence, too, if they’re objective and if they’re any good. Good scientists recognize the limits of their work’s significance and certainty.

I started this blog because I’m interested in climate, because I have questions that I wanted to research, and because so many people have legitimate* questions – but are insulted instead of answered on blogs where people do know physics.

I appreciate this blog. Just wanted to let you know.

About 15 years ago, I was working through my views on evolution vs creationism, and similar blogs like Panda’s Thumb really helped me. There were some insults thrown my way, sure, but it was mostly fair insults, saying “do your DD. Here are some links”.

There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, but at the same time, I can understand frustration with those who form strong opinions before they get educated, and particularly so if they’re resistant to changing those opinions when new data comes along. But that’s another subject.

In any case, it’s important to have somewhere where the data is laid out in a way that people can easily understand it, and (hopefully) in a neutral, friendly, not-emotionally-charged setting.

Not really. What they believe is that if the communicator is not able to deliver what they believe to be a convincing argument, then possibly the argument needs further investigation and the benefit of the doubt is not given. When the primary thrust for a conclusion is an argument from authority it doesn’t help.

When the subject in question is environmental science which has a very checkered history on the reliability of their conclusions and an overly zealous activist movement, it doesn’t help.

When the first deep dive you take is an investigation into the mathematics of the Hockey Stick which made the IPCC cover, it doesn’t help.

When the further down you look into items such as extreme events, extinctions, and sea level rise, and you find that the science is being overstated by the media, it doesn’t help.

When the science allegedly has a high risk to society, but nuclear, fracking, and hydro are taken off the table by those most alarmed, it doesn’t help.

Most of the science is reasonable, much of how it is interpreted and reported by politicians, activists, and the media is not.

Windchaser, you just don’t have a clue of the facts, and are projecting your personal belief. I am a ScD aerospace scientist with a specialty in fluid mechanics and thermal science. I am of Jewish background, and I believe in evolution. However I am a skeptic, not of the fact that there is some effect, but that it is nearly as significant as stated by the main stream position, due to careful study of the science and facts. There are many experts with PhD’s, including most of the astronauts and Apollo scientists. There are very many of the worlds top scientists who made a large effort to understand the details of the science and stated they are skeptics of the stated extreme claims. In fact, it is mostly people who are presently funded due to their work on AGW, or totally ignorent people, that make the main part of supporters, while older well established scientists, including very many climate experts, that are skeptics. A major difference is that most of these skeptics do not depend on funding from the subject (many are retired, or so well respected they have nothing to threaten them). Your comments are nonsense.

verytallguy, I looked up on Wikipedia examples of ‘something denial’ as a phrase. Only found three in common usage, Climate d, AIDS/HIV d, and Genocide/Holocaust d, so the objections to its use can’t just be waved away by saying it is an ordinary word.

It’s a completely different subject (from the main point of this article) to discuss more general use of insulting terms, but seeing as I have opened up the article for more general debate..

There is a huge range of opinion that is tarred with the ‘d..r’ insult. I’m sure we can all agree that it is not meant as a compliment. Perhaps those applying it are calmly thinking it’s just a statement of fact (leaving aside the issue of its relationship – or not – to the Holocaust).

Leaving aside another completely different point about whether insulting people is a good overall strategy in a large political debate (obviously it has pros and cons from the point of view of “winning” when we are not concerned about good taste and etiquette)..

There is an interesting point about the range of ideas that are tarred with being from ‘d..rs’ – everything from not knowing the absolute basics of radiation through to much more complex topics. This is picking up the comment from stevefitzpatrick earlier.

A lot of people, including myself, actually worked in environments which used finite element analysis (models) to solve engineering and physics problems. In my case it was a long time ago and semiconductor physics but the principles are the same.

From the very small pool of people I know, those who have a good, or excellent, understanding of models are more skeptical of GCM outputs than those who have no understanding of how models work.

How can this be?

From the many comments on this blog and other blogs that I have read, many people who question the % likelihood of GCM outputs being correct are doing so from the experience of working with real models. Not from being in denial of basic science. (Of course, there is a huge volume of comments from people questioning GCMs because they have no idea about the absolute basics – see this blog for evidence).

Questioning the reliability of a complex model is not denying basic science. Unless – and I only realized this just now – GCMs have solved the problems that beset other modeling endeavors.

In my very out of date case, back in the dark ages, the model would predict, for example, if we etch this shape on the edge of the silicon, and cover it with this much oxide, the p-n junction will break down at this voltage. They break down at the edge – so edge effects are the most important, and there the slope, overall shape and thickness of dieletric are all important. Then we wait a few weeks while we, or others, make samples (doping junctions at high temperatures in furnaces, acid etching, growing oxides in furnaces, wearing ‘bunny suits’).

The voltage breakdown of the new samples turns out to be quite a bit lower than predicted, which is bad. The modeling guys play around with the parameters in the model. Now the model matches reality. Great, next prediction with our revised model is – we etch this shape, use this much oxide and voila!

Except voila never came.

The model was never great at predicting what to do next. And we were just using electric field theory in a 3-d grid and whatever equations related to how the p-n junction worked (none of which I would have any recollection of now). That’s pretty simple stuff.

By comparison, fluid mechanics, necessary in climate models, is proven to be a much harder problem (for reasons clear to those who understand non-linear equations and modeling).

One of the key problems was obtaining knowledge of parameters. Papers in the field gave ranges of empirical parameters but using those never gave the right future values. On the other hand, finding parameter values so that recent experiments lined up with model results was pretty much a breeze. Predicting the future was harder.

The people who had to produce the results didn’t have a lot of confidence in the models. The people who worked on the models believed in the value of the models.

We gradually improved products really through trial and error, with knowledge of the basic physics of electric field breakdown at a boundary as the guide to what to try next.

Of course, none of this has any relevance to climate science so I don’t know why I brought it up (Richard T – satire alert).

None of this means climate models are a waste of time, or can’t tell us anything. GCMs are invaluable.

Unfortunately, in the excitement of the polarized, invective-laden atmosphere of climate science debate, everyone not 100% in agreement with “the right camp” is labeled with the same terms as those who hilariously believe the last 100 years of physics is “all wrong”, or can’t do basic maths and “use” this skill to “prove something” about climate.

But none of that was the reason for writing the article. It was probably listening to my history book – The Coming of the Third Reich.

I’m in materials modeling, actually, so I also have some experience with non-chaotic modeling.

On the one hand, I can say that modeling has come a long way in the last 20 years. On the other hand, we still frequently push out too far, with too little understanding of the accuracy of the parameters or the model. In materials we have a long way to go in bridging lengthscales from top to bottom, and that seems to also hold in climate modeling.

But the efficacy of modeling is extremely problem-dependent. If the problem is well-formulated and the results primarily depend on well-understood subparts, then the modeling can produce amazing insights. As the quality of the parameters and their interactions decreases, so does the quality of the results.

Remember “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

So of course the models are imperfect, and have problems. The question is whether these problems affect the results that we’re looking for. (Also, would we know if the problems did, and furthermore, can we quantify these problems’ effects on our result?)

But many of the “skeptics” I talk to don’t care about that question. They see a problem in the models’ results, any problem, and they assume that it’s deadly for the results, without actually thinking through whether it matters and how much.

I’m not happy with the climate models right now. I’m far from satisfied. But I don’t yet see any evidence that they’re missing something extra and important, something that would change the main results.

Sod,
“From the very small pool of people I know, those who have a good, or excellent, understanding of models are more skeptical of GCM outputs than those who have no understanding of how models work.

How can this be?”

As you note, part of the skepticism is due to experience with modeling, but part is due to experience working on difficult and not fully understood problems in a ‘noisy’ (in an informational sense) environment. The final part is that the models have pretty consistently predicted far more warming than observed. Taken together, these things tell me that the models are very unlikely able to make accurate long term predictions. I find empirical estimates of sensitivity far more convincing.

Profoundly useful reminiscence and reflection SoD. One of the many things most deployers of the D-word won’t do is say who definitely lies outside its mocking scope.

“Of course I don’t include Lindzen…”
“McIntyre is annoying but he’s not denying basic physics…”
“Richard Tol is bad at spotting irony but…”

It a catch-all, for anyone who disagrees with Climate Central and their issue-de-jour. At that point it really becomes rather ridiculous. Oh, apart from those who had to go through the real Holocaust. They’ve been trivialised once again but do we care? Nope, we having too much fun winding up anyone who doubts the output of a GCM or anything downstream from there.

On a scale of 1 to 10 of impressing the ‘other side’ by the quality of your argument mark me down as number unobtainable.

GCMs are not the reason people believe the earth is warming. If your friends are using their previous experiences with bad models as an excuse to ignore basic science, then yes, they are d’s. CO2 absorbs IR. CO2 is increasing. That increase is caused by human activities. We have observed a temperature increase that cannot be explained except as a response to increasing CO2. Where do the models fit in?

There is a question of how much temperature will increase in the coming years; there is a question of what affect that increase will have. If only the discussion were focused on these questions!

D’s are people that d**y the basic science, usually for some BS reason like “well, my models never worked” but really because “don’t raise my taxes!”

The point is a bit more subtle. My friends and acquaintances who understand models are very scientifically literate and none of them doubt CO2 as a GHG, or that the earth is warming, or that CO2 is a principal cause.

Where do models come in?

If you read chapter 11 of IPCC AR5 you will see that models are necessary for attribution.

The comparison is of model simulations with GHG increases vs model simulation without GHG increases. I wrote two articles about this, referenced in this article. Here is the later one.

This is how the determination is made of, as you describe “..a temperature increase that cannot be explained except as a response to increasing CO2..”

You are free to attribute motives or political agendas to people who ask questions or claim something different from consensus climate science in this [non-standard] article – but in the rest of the blog we stay away from it, as described in the Etiquette.

“If you read chapter 11 of IPCC AR5 you will see that models are necessary for attribution. ”

Not just attribution.

Manabe-Strickler demonstrated that without convection, the atmosphere radiates less effectively than with convection. The non-radiative transfer of heat in part determines the resulting radiative transfer to space.

SOD, if what you say is true, then the people you are talking about are not d*n*rs. But if they are really so involved and so interested, I would hope they are actually reading the papers and questioning results. In my experience, that is not common. Many people will go straight from “I know models” to “global warming is crap.”

So your friends really have in-depth discussions about attribution and technical issues in modeling? Or do they just say — attribution requires modeling, I know modeling, it’s hard — I don’t believe it.

I would be very interested in a poll of researchers who are actively involved in modeling in fluid dynamics (outside climate science). There must be a lot – it’s a big field with aeronautics, heat exchangers and lots of high value research.

“How reliable do you believe climate model predictions of future temperature are, assuming the various scenarios for GHG emissions are correct – at 20 years, 50 years and 100 years?”

There’s probably a few more questions that could usefully be added.

I have no idea what the results would be but I wonder if there would be less confidence in the reliability of climate model predictions than the generally scientifically literate population. (Whatever that means, maybe I have to downgrade my wish to the general population).

Maybe someone has already done this?

And a note for concerned heretic watchers new to this blog – I have no doubts about the greenhouse effect, or the fact that increasing anthropogenic GHGs has been a significant contribution to rising temperatures of the last 100 years.

Sad isn’t it when both SoD and Kloor find it necessary to go for brownie points, and clarify, clarify and clarify again that they ARE part of the Good Guys Brigade indeed, and have NO DOUBTS about the greenhouse effect, or the fact that increasing anthropogenic GHGs has been a significant contribution to rising temperatures of the last 100 years.

You are missing a very important point.

I have been labelled a D many many times. I have even collected all the insults received during a brief period in the Greenfyre blog

What’s the issue? The issue is that in my About page there is a text from 2007 where I clearly state that I have no doubts about the greenhouse effect, or the fact that increasing anthropogenic GHGs has been a significant contribution to rising temperatures of the last 100 years.

It’s from eight years ago. Yet the “concerned heretic watchers” would not and will not accept my membership of the Good Guys Brigade.

And who wrote that text? Why, Willis Eschenbach of WUWT fame. This should obviously and clearly and definitely destroy Kloor’s defense. WUWT is not the Very Bad Place he tried to describe in order to get brownie points.

Know what, the vituperated Bishop Hill has a blog owner who I suspect would subscribe to the same – that is, he has no doubts about the greenhouse effect, or the fact that increasing anthropogenic GHGs has been a significant contribution to rising temperatures of the last 100 years. There is a category of self-style Lukewarmers: Ridley, Lomborg, Lawson among them.

However, as seen countless times and for at least seven years and again in this thread, and about Ridley and Lomborg and Lawson, this does not matter. The people who utter the D word do not care about what the objects of their ires actually think: because the issue is not one’s opinion on the GHG properties of CO2, and not even what the temperature record says, or what the equations may indicate, or how good the numerical solutions we call Models are.

The issue for those who want/need to use the D word has been indicated by the Guardian some time ago: a skeptic is somebody who thinks at least some of the alarming claims made about climate change are exaggerated.

Conversely, a Believer is somebody who thinks no alarming claim is exaggerated.

In other words, a Believer does see the world as destined to a fiery and burning death. With the catastrophe approaching, anybody who doesn’t agree we’re a few years away from total collapse of civilization and more, is put in the D category.

You guys, (SoD and Kloor) are hovering about, almost ready to fall in the B camp. Maybe you should make it clear to yourselves and to your readers.

Are some claims of what is going to happen about global warming and climate change, exaggerated?

Yes, SOD, such a survey would be interesting. What I’ve found in my decade long journey into uncertainty in fluid dynamics is that there are 2 distinct classes of scientists.

The first class is not too familiar with the technical details but perhaps uses the codes or perhaps sells the codes. There is a strong positive results bias in the CFD literature that I instinctively knew was there 35 years ago. In the last decade, we’ve documented it carefully and will have a new statistical analysis coming out this year sometime. Basically, the CFD literature is very misleading. There is a large class of people who believe the literature is representative of actual code performance, especially outsiders and non-scientists. They are mistaken.

The second class is those who actually write the codes and the engineers who are actually accountable for the performance of real products. This class includes virtually all turbulence modelers, who are as a group quite clever and rather honest. They know all about the problems and issues, but I’ve found that even in this class there is a bias that the codes and methods are better than they really are. I’ve made at least a score of converts in this camp in the last decade though. These people are generally honest and have high integrity.

The real question is will I be able to complete this program of work before I face my inevitable departure from this interesting and fun world.

I think everyone agrees that this is probably one of the most difficult modeling problems around. How much we can trust these predictions is a big question.

I think models this complex require an iterative process of code – test – analyze results to become significantly better.

I know it is against the rules to bring up weather modeling, but I have watched with great interest the evolution of hurricane tracking models over the last 20 years. I live in Florida. 20 years ago they were pretty poor, and their tracks were only useful up to a 24 hour threshold. Today they give reliable cones 3 days out.

How do I know I can trust these models? Because they perform against observations over and over and over. (Note: Hurricane strength predictions are still poor).

How did they get better? They examine every track against observations and determine where the model went wrong and what the most important parameters are. They do it iteratively, they didn’t just lock themselves in a room for 20 years thinking great math thoughts. I’d feel a lot better about climate predictions if they had 500 years of detailed observations in the bank.

In this view, we are on climate model v1.0. Unfortunately the iteration loop time is probably 50 years. How good is v1.0? I have no idea and I don’t sense other people do either. Good enough to say more CO2 = higher temperatures? Very likely. Good enough to say it will be +3C instead of +1.5C by 2100? Doubtful. Good enough to tell the Audubon Society that 50% of North American birds will go extinct? Very unlikely.

One of the most interesting points is that weather forecasts for some time now have been run as ensemble forecasts (with slightly different initial conditions and also slightly different parameters) – then the % likelihood of events are recorded. Later the % forecast of events is compared with the % of events that took place.

So, if we run 100 ensembles and get 5 with the chance of a severe storm, the severe storm is forecast at 5% probability. Then there is a plot of % forecast vs % actual – which should result in a straight line: 5% probability events happen 5% of the time, 20% probability events happen 20% of the time and so on.

The “under-confidence” or “over-confidence” of the models is then identified and the work of resolving the problems takes place.

What is important is that running 1 model simulation with the “best observations” as starting points and the “best estimate of parameters” does definitely a worse job than an ensemble forecast.

For one thing, it can’t identify the probability of an extreme event (because there is only 1 outcome in the simulation). But also, it doesn’t get such good results even in the more normal cases.

Weather forecasting is much easier than climate modeling because we can test the results.

I’m only joking, if you make analogies between how chaos limits weather modeling and how this might also limit climate models you typically get shouted down in a lot of forums. I have read all your modeling post and learned quite a lot. The statistics of chaotic systems with the pendulum was very interesting.

I think they do much the same thing with ensembles and hurricane forecasts. The spaghetti plots of predicted hurricane tracks for different models is one of the most useful things they do. It is so useful that they routinely show it on local television weather forecasts. You can intuitively quickly determine if the models are in tight agreement and that usually indicates higher reliability.

The 7 day out models are actually pretty reliable for if a hurricane will make landfall or be a fish storm. This would have been hopeless 20 years ago. They are still terrible at hurricane season prediction.

This is actually one of the reasons I started looking into this subject. After Katrina Florida insurance rates spiked immediately when they stopped using historical disaster costs and instead relied on climate models which predicted more frequent and stronger storms. That hasn’t been a successful prediction so far.

I think you have to consider the possibility of continuing to invest on multiple fronts to improve GCMs has seriously hit diminishing returns if our interest is in the policy questions that depend on what might happen to global temp over the next 50-100 years.

And yes, I meant that last bit. I’m doubtful for a variety of reasons that for policy purposes we really need to know much more than the global temp.

Need to scramble around in the tool bag for something else and collapse all the GCM modelling groups into one and put the resources elsewhere.

It’s hard to see where GCM’s would have an “aha moment” in the next decade and everyone would suddenly believe they are now trustworthy. Somebody may even have a valid inspiration but there wouldn’t be any way to really verify it. Bigger faster computers would allow them to increase resolution and so forth but it is unclear if this would produce meaningfully better results.

Given a zero sum budget game, I would prefer money be moved from modeling into energy research. This could potentially produce a game changer.

Just to add to that I also think that there are in fact likely to be other modeling techniques that could inform the policy process better in the foreseeable future. Getting to these comes down to better definition of the (in my view pretty limited) policy requirements than is done at present.

In part this starts with a problem endemic in applied science – technology push – but in this case the shiny new gizmo (aka GCMs) has an addictive element (“I can give you a glimpse of the future”) that makes it hard for the policy user to step back and say I can live without this.

I have “debated” with both climate science deniers and Holocaust deniers, and there are many traits spookily in common.

Mostly, there is a pronounced to seize on a small corner of the evidence and thrash it to death (growth of Antarctic sea ice, or differences in eyewitness accounts of Treblinka)

Another is to talk about large myths, especially conspiracy theories – green scientists are conspiring to introduce Communism by the back door, or the Jews own all the newspapers and media so control the news etc.

To be “in denial” is an accepted term – like the alcoholic who won’t admit a drinking problem, or the spouse who won’t face the obvious fact that their partner is a cheat. These are the ones who cannot face the consequences of accepting unpleasant facts – Holocaust deniers cannot face the fact that anti-Semitism can have and had genocidal consequences. The evasion of climate change deniers has already been mentioned.

There are vaccine deniers, Moon landing hoaxers and Kennedy assassination obsessives who are in a similar boat. Call a spade a spade, and a denier a denier.

You may see common traits, that’s your prerogative. But has it never occured to you that you may be trivialising the Holocaust if you use Climate D****r? Conspiracist is a useful word. Crazy conspiracist sometimes fits the bill. But as SoD put it:

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

Despite your obvious and principled contempt for those you have run into who express doubt on aspects of climate science and policy that you feel you understand much better than they do, did not this paragraph give you any pause for thought?

No, ‘den1er’ is being declared equivalent to a Holocaust den1er. That’s clear from the many explicit comparisons made as the term first came into vogue. If your interpretation was the only possible one I’d have no problem with it. (I might disagree but I’d have no problem with the way it was expressed.) It’s the clear statement of equivalence with Holocaust denial that is the whole of the problem here. You need to return to every one of those explicit comparisons and prove to any of us called den1er why we should discount them.

The same list of quotations republished by Watts Up With That, SoD, of which I said earlier:

Seeking to squirm out by saying you mean less than Holocaust denial is less than convincing given the extent of this history and the dearth of examples of people like yourself calling out those in your own camp who have made the analogy absolutely explicit. See WUWT last year for some useful examples if you want to make a start in putting this right.

May I reiterate this point. The claim from many here is that when they use the D-word it has nothing to do with the Holocaust. But why not? Presumably because they agree with you that such a comparison between two such different categories of error would be repugnant. And, if so, surely they can at once point to the times and places where they publicly complained about the many explicit comparisons listed by Popular Technology.

I think Shub gets some stuff right in this comment (although certainly not all)..but what Shub doesn’t get is that Keith has a special magic that makes his name-calling effective while everyone else’s is counterproductive.

Those quotes are where people have linked the two; something I think is pointless and stupid. But the fact that they had to spell it out undermines the idea that simply using the D word means you are linking it to Holocaust D.

Claiming that using the D-word implies you are linking it to Holocaust D appears to be a syllogism; and that’s a pretty weak (if not the weakest) form of logic.

The people defending the use of “denier” in the global warming debate generally won’t be open about how the word has been used in said debate. They’ll often divert the discussion into uses of “denial,” a different word or find other ways to say there is no reason to make an association with the Holocaust.

There are two central problems to this. First, it is abundantly clear the association exists given people’s reactions. Even if people don’t think “denier” should be associated with the Holocaust, it is clear it is in the minds of at least some people. People defending the use of the word never seem to recognize this. When confronted with it, they often say it is nothing but a dishonest ploy to trick people. You can see such in a number of responses to this post.

The second problem is people have intentionally associated global warming “deniers” with Holocaust deniers. I remember back in 2007 people complaining when Ellen Goodman said:

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

That was in the Boston Globe. Just last year, we had the Guardian publish an article which said:

And please, can I have no emails from bed-wetting kidults blubbing that you can’t call us “global warming deniers ” because “denier” makes us sound like “Holocaust deniers”, and that means you are comparing us to Nazis? The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.

And people like Chris Mooney lament the lack of cooperation from journalists in pushing the “right” scientific messages, saying:

Rather, in each and every story, journalists have to make a judgment about how credible their sources are. The obvious reductio ad absurdum is Holocaust deniers: Should their perspective be provided, for “balance,” any time someone writes about the Holocaust? Of course not.

George Monbiot once said:

Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.

DeSmogBlog, a favorite resource of some of the very people we’ve seen respond to this post denying any association between “denier” and Holocaust once said:

These are not debunkers, testing outrageous claims with scientific rigor. They are deniers – like Holocaust deniers.

Jim Powell, whose work on studying the global warming “conensus” helped spark the infamouse Skeptical Science paper on the subject published a book which said:

Those who abjure global warming are not skeptics; they are deniers. To call them skeptics is to debase language as much as to call the Ku Klux Klan “prejudiced,” Holocaust deniers “biased,” or Flat-Earthers “mistaken.

There are many more examples, and I limited myself to people creating explicit associations. I didn’t even touch on the constant references to Nazis/World War II. Distasteful ones like the Skeptical Science Hiroshima app may be excused, but we have people like the head of the IPCC, Richard Pachuri, demonizing people by saying things like:

If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.

People intentionally associated global warming “deniers” with Holocaust deniers. It’s been explicitly done in popular media and by science communicators in the global warming arena. It’s accepted enough they are willing to put it in books. Even the head of the IPCC compares people he dislikes to Hitler.

The association is real. The association was intentional. The association is disgusting, and it disgusting people continue to defend it.

We’re not talking about dessicated logic but living language. Someone earlier called me a pedant for pointing out that the pattern we’re looking for is “[abstract noun] d****r”. But it’s exactly that pattern that made Climate D****r instantly recognisable to any English-speaker, as the term emerged around 2007, as an allusion to the Holocaust variant, which was the only established usage at that time.

There are four options here:

1. You use the D-word and admit the Holocaust reference, which you believe is valid.

2. You use the D-word, deny it implies the Holocaust reference but still believe the comparison with Holocaust D****l is fair.

3. You use the D-word, deny it implies the Holocaust reference but agree with SoD that the comparison with Holocaust D****l is outrageously inappropriate.

4. You refuse to use the D-word.

Which is it? People are often less than clear between 2 and 3. I call that playing games of the worst kind.

Joshua writes:
“What is the point of this rhetorical flourish? To suggest that knowledge about, and sadness about, mass murder somehow reflects an inherently causal explanation for “concern” about the use of the D word in the climate wars?”

Your article contains a barrage of ad hominem shots at skeptical blogs. The thrust of your conclusion is that people need to re-consider calling climate skeptics names because they – the name-callers – would not look good to ‘fence-sitters and lurkers’, i.e., argument from consequence.

Knowing the history of the term and knowing how it came into use in the climate, as Shollenberger recounts above, how did you find yourself hesitating to come up with an unequivocal condemnation?

I remember back when you highlighted one of my comments from Judith’s over at your bog – when you were similarly impressed. In fact, called you it “brilliant’ (or something like that).

In fact, you felt so positive about my views that you sent me a personal email(s?) telling me how much you respected my views.

Of course, that’s before I disagreed with you on some issues – most specifically your use of name-calling in your posts about GMOs, and in response you started in with name-calling toward me, and calling me a “troll.”

The message I conveyed in that comment at Judith’s – the one that you wrote a post about – was actually very similar to the one I just expressed w/r/t to SoD’s post.

Look at Richard Drake’s comment from above:

90% of my disgust is about the fact that anyone using this rhetorical device clearly doesn’t give a damn about the real victims of the Holocaust.

I think that there was a similar tone to SoD’s original post – as if somehow calling someone a “denier” meant that they didn’t understand or appreciate the history of the holocaust. I disagree with the implication.

If it wasn’t the implication of his rhetorical flourish – where he started by describing his interest in the topic – and I was wrong, then he’ll get over it. I made it clear that I have no reason to believe that his views about the holocaust are anything but sincere.

It reminds me of when Ridley began an article where he accused environmental researchers as a class of being corrupt, by a discussion about how he’s always been a champion of science (as if those who disagree with his views aren’t).

What cracks me up about you, Keith, is that you often hand-wring about the impact of name-calling even as you regularly name-call yourself. Nice way of showing your concern about the use of the D-word – by using the T-word.

I really, really enjoyed this post, because many times I run through the same process in my mind. “Start with the GHG theory, and etc.” I typically mull over a few more steps, such as “We have data that shows CO2 is increasing; we know this CO2 is ours because of the relative abundances of isotopes; part of the attribution analysis must consider the apparent cooling of the stratosphere and the warming of the troposphere, and etc.”

A big thumbs-up to your entire blog! I very much like the tone you set.

Here’s another recent example of a noun in apposition with “denial”, of the type Richard Darke claims is a trend with its origins in the term “holocaust denial (on the somewhat dubious evidence of some dude sounding off on the Bishop Hill blog) :

So the Jewish Business News is calling Dawkins a God – denier. Hmm, are they trivialising the holocaust here?

Maybe out of kindness to those who feel that whether of not people are actually making a comparison with holocaust denial when they use the word or its cognates in other contexts we should seek to regard the term as POLITICALLY INCORRECT. Funny, though, that those who are hostile to the idea of AGW being a significant problem for mankind tend to have a strong hostility towards “political correctness”.

The same quibble that’s been made elsewhere. Of course Jewish Business News aren’t trivialising the Holocaust because nobody in their right minds would ever think they are implying any equivalence between Dawkins and a Holocaust D****r. Just as when Richard Lindzen says ironically “as far as such a thing is possible, I’m a Climate D****r” nobody in their right mind would take him to be trivialising the deaths of some in his own family. As I’ve already said the pattern has begun to be extended, in one-off cases, in English usage since around 2010. But Climate D****r began in 1998 and only that case have explicit comparisons be made with Holocaust D****l. This clever, clever quibbling may work in other areas of the climate debate. Here it’s not just tiresome but morally repugnant.

Here’s an idea. How about using the term AGW-dismisser or climate change-dismisser. It would cover all those who think that, on the basis of what we know, AGW can be dismissed as a significant problem, This would include the various contributors to this discussion who certainly don’t d**y that there has been some warming but claim that we know too little to justify any action on the matter.

SOD: Many consensus climate scientists refuse to publicly debate skeptical scientists. They claim that this spreads misinformation to many (especially reflexive right-wingers, rebels, simple-minded contrarians, etc.) and provides skeptics with undeserved attention and status. I don’t accept these arguments. However, if I substitute “Holocaust den1al” for “climate change den1al”, I these arguments may have some validity. If a few crackpots try to get publicity for the former, are they entitled to the same kind of full public debate that climate skeptics would like to see? If not, who decides whether public debate is warranted? It appears as if the CAGW consensus has succeeded in equating these two positions and suppressing debate.

I suppose the question is whether they believe a public debate would improve one side’s position or not. The fact that team science appears to believe a public debate would not strengthen their position is a bit curious. I think they are comfortable with their current appeal to authority and debating themselves through the normal academic channels. That’s fine, but one shouldn’t gripe about what the public’s view is if you are not willing to engage critics.

Why is it that a perfectly good word which is defined by the flagship English language dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary, as follows:

D…r – noun
A person who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence:
a prominent d…r of global warming
a climate change d…r

…is purloined by people for whatever purpose.

I probably can’t even post a link to the definition as it seems the word is so reviled here that it disallows it being printed. Just Google the word + Oxford Dictionary and select definition 2.

This article is most unfortunate. It is wrong in so many ways. Not just in the abuse of the English language (a wrong definition of the word “d…r”) but in a mistaken appreciation of what it *means* to reject climate science, and a mistaken understanding of what it *takes* to accept or reject climate science.

One doesn’t have to know how to work out equations to accept climate science any more than one has to understand the intricacies of biology to accept evolution, or the details of geology to appreciate the age of the world, or the ins and outs of modern physics to accept that there are tiny particles, or an in-depth understanding of the immune system to accept or reject the value of vaccines.

People reject climate science for all sorts of reasons, but only very, very rarely would it be because they find equations too complex. Social science tells us that it is much more likely to be because it is incompatible with a person’s world view and/or their ideology. Many people pretend to reject climate science because they have a vested interest in doing so (and/or because it is part of their job description) – such as the professional disinformers (who feed off science d…rs).

This article seriously detracts from the blog, which is a shame, because otherwise you have some very good articles here, SoD, for people who *are* interested in the mathematics of climate science.

There are already way too many apologists for people who wilfully reject climate science to the detriment of society. It is dismaying that you seek to fan the flames now, SoD, just when the US tide could be starting to turn in favour of science.

Good grief, Sou, what a litany of superficial and unscientific nonsense. Did you read Brandon Schollenberter’s comment about the association and how it has become established by common usage in the press?

Who is apologizing for anyone? Some people are wrong on a whole host of issues. Some people sympathized with the enemy during the civil war. Abraham Lincoln’s approach was far more effective and humane than the approach of the radicals. Why do you feel that name calling is going to help change their minds or do anything other make you feel virtuous in some strange way. Name calling is for children, not adults.

..There are already way too many apologists for people who wilfully reject climate science to the detriment of society. It is dismaying that you seek to fan the flames now, SoD, just when the US tide could be starting to turn in favour of science.

Why did you do it?

Because I am part of an evil empire of disinformation. I have worked carefully for over five years to allay suspicion – and now, [cackle] I have fooled everyone and can move to the next phase of our masterplan to destroy the world!!

“On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘d…r’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.”

This is the problematic part of your post.
There’s a use of absolutes here that is simply not true. Nor have you adequately made the case for this claim.

It’s the kind of claim that ATTP criticised in his post “2+2=4, therefore Einstein is wrong”. The two parts of your claim do not equate.

To claim that the use of the d word trivializes the Holocaust is… well… wrong. Perhaps in your head it does, and everyone will respect your choice not to allow the term because you find it offensive, but that is very different from claiming that is what the d-word does.

If not, then why do you suppose not, given that you run towards being skeptical of the “consensus” view w/r/t the climate’s sensitivity to ACO2 emissions?

Again – not defending the term, but I wonder if people do accept your skepticism without labeling you with a pejorative – in which case then it seems folks are distinguishing your views from those that they call “D-words.”

Perhaps it is because you’ve got strong science chops, and because you, yourself don’t engage in labeling with pejoratives.

Then perhaps those who get called the D-word are different from you in those respects. Perhaps they are folks who engage in labeling with pejoratives themselves, and who don’t have strong scientific chops?

Never to my knowledge. I am mostly accused of being an AGW or “CAGW” advocate.

If not, then why do you suppose not, given that you run towards being skeptical of the “consensus” view w/r/t the climate’s sensitivity to ACO2 emissions?

I’m not skeptical of the value.

I’m skeptical of the certainty, the confidence and the statistical significance often cited, especially by the IPCC executive summary (although I can cite not just papers referenced in the IPCC chapters but sometimes the text of various IPCC chapters as at least support from some parts of “consensus climate science” for most positions that I believe).

To be clearer, I have no idea whether the mean value is too high or low, or whether the range is too wide or too narrow.

Measuring it is difficult – you can see my articles on the measurement in Measuring Climate Sensitivity. And I haven’t done the subject justice, that series was on one aspect of the problem, the real problem is much harder.

I suspect that much larger ensembles (perturbed physics ensembles) of GCMs with much higher resolution will give a larger range with less of a bell curve – thus, not solving the problem for anyone.

My prediction – in 20 years time, the modeling question will be as confused as it is now. More confused in fact, because more time and the 10,000x more computing power available would have been expected to bring greater clarity.

But that wasn’t your question..

..Then perhaps those who get called the D-word are different from you in those respects. Perhaps they are folks who engage in labeling with pejoratives themselves, and who don’t have strong scientific chops?

I have no idea.

I didn’t write this article because I had people in mind who comment in climate science blog discussions.

I wrote the article because I had the Holocaust victims in mind. I’ve already outlined my understanding – that ‘d..r’ was applied to “people we don’t agree with in climate science/people confused about atmospheric physics” as a smear by association to Holocaust deniers, and it made me very upset.

I’ve since been told that lots of people don’t think ‘d..r’ is anything to do with the Holocaust d..rs in their understanding and I respect that. (See my earlier comment).

Equally, many people have read the association of Holocaust d…rs with “heretics in climate” in many mainstream publications. That can’t be ignored either.

When I hear the term ‘d..r’ I hear ‘David Irving and other apologists for Auschwitz‘ ringing loud and clear and I have a strong reaction.

It’s nothing to do with the “heresy of people who might be confused about physics/maths/statistics but are most likely agents of the evil empire of disinformation”. It’s all to do with the 1930s and 1940s.

==> “Equally, many people have read the association of Holocaust d…rs with “heretics in climate” in many mainstream publications. That can’t be ignored either.”

I agree with you there – with the caveat that I think that with some folks, the concern about being compared to holocaust d*niers is not so straight forward. Many of those same folks who express that concern, turn around and use similarly pejorative labels. Or even the d*nier label itself.

kkloor Mod DavidAppell • 10 hours ago
You don’t see it because you’re in d*nial, plain and simple.

and :

curryja | October 14, 2014 at 5:45 pm | ReplyYes, they confuse extreme weather events as being caused by anthropogenic global warming. I would call them extreme weather d*niers – they seem to be in d*nial that these are caused naturally.

That leads me to conclude that even if some really are offended, for some at least, the concern is being used as a rhetorical device – and then, in fact, it is the concern about the term that is effectively trivializing the problem of holocaust d*nial.

Generally, my feeling is that if you are offended by people assigning you guilt by association to bad people, you shouldn’t be engaged in these discussions, because the phenomenon is ubiquitious.

I don’t defend the use of the term d*nier. My reasons are similar to those that Keith excerpted in his article from Faye Flam:

What if we don’t have evidence as to whether a person is in denial? A much more appropriate word would be “wrong” because we don’t generally have access to the internal mental states of people who are saying wrong things. Denial implies people are aware of something but can’t face it. Some people may be in denial about global warming, but how do we know they aren’t just unaware? Or perhaps they are influenced by misinformation?

I think that if someone uses the term, they are basically displaying poor reasoning and making a bad argument.

Plus, pejoriative labeling is childish, and inherently sub-optimal if not always counterproductive.

I think only high profile people in public view get personally called the d word. It isn’t that common for people to address a specific comment or person with “you’re just a d word”. Because if this happens the inevitable response is that one can then ask what specifically are they are in d…l about. This will then twist the accuser into knots trying to specify what he means and if it justifiable and it can get embarrassing. Everyone has learned that lesson exactly once.

So instead the term is applied vaguely without specificity, and this makes it easier to defend its use. There are people who don’t believe the earth has warmed, this must apply only to them. Or not. It’s simply just a group slander meant to encompass anyone who isn’t on team AGW is dangerous and political action must be taken now.

Why does SoD not get called this in his own forum? Evolution has trained us to not attack an alpha dog on his own turf. It can end poorly.

Fortunately the IPCC had the good sense to toss in a scenario to cover most of the low end so they could maintain at least a shred of credibility.

I’m not so naive to deny my own biases, but these are objective measures
and before you moan about the few that deny radiative forcing out right ( which the topic of your post does implicitly ) perhaps you could reflect on your own denials.

It is not surprising that you would tend to promote evidence to support your preconception and deny evidence that contradicts it.

Example:
MODEL: ***SoD Warming High: 6C (above, undescribed )..

I’m really not clear what you are trying to say. The field of climate modeling is continually developing. I’m a fan of ensemble modeling, it’s where the future of climate modeling will be, and in my ranges was thinking of (but didn’t look up, review, write down confidence intervals..):

In the latest generation of coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) contributing to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP-3), uncertainties in key properties controlling the twenty-first century response to sustained anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing were not fully sampled, partially owing to a correlation between climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing, a tendency to overestimate ocean heat uptake and compensation between short-wave and long-wave feedbacks..

..From this evidence it is clear that the CMIP-3 ensemble, which represents a valuable expression of plausible responses consistent with our current ability to explore model structural uncertainties, fails to reflect the full range of uncertainties indicated by expert opinion and other methods.

In the absence of uncertainty guidance or indicators at regional scales, studies have relied on the CMIP-3 ensemble spread as a proxy for response uncertainty, or statistical post-processing to correct and inflate uncertainty estimates, at the risk of violating the physical constraints provided by dynamical AOGCM simulations, especially when extrapolating beyond the range of behaviour in the raw ensemble.

Perturbed-physics ensembles offer a systematic approach to quantify uncertainty in models of the climate system response to external forcing. Here we investigate uncertainties in the twenty- first century transient response in a multi-thousand-member ensemble of transient AOGCM simulations from 1920 to 2080 using HadCM3L, a version of the UK Met Office Unified Model, as part of the climateprediction.net British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) climate change experiment (CCE).

We generate ensemble members by perturbing the physics in the atmosphere, ocean and sulphur cycle components, with transient simulations driven by a set of natural forcing scenarios and the SRES A1B emissions scenario, and also control simulations to account for unforced model drifts.

Here is Stainforth et al:

And Rowlands et al:

And the fact that Nature publishes the paper means that at least in the view of this prestigious journal, the model simulation ranges are not set in stone. In fact, they allow the authors to present a heresy that the IPCC ranges under-represent climate uncertainty in models.

Someone who suggests different values from the IPCC last report isn’t necessarily someone with a high motivation to deceive others, or “deny” basic science. Truly no one knows the answer to these questions at the moment.

Climate science is a fascinating subject.

Climate science blog debates are mostly a place where psychologists should be actively testing their theories and not much is learnt about climate science, as you are helpfully demonstrating:

– Asks for people not to use an insult used to attack people not in agreement with consensus climate science. Conclusion: Must be biased. Let’s read a statement and identify the bias we are expecting.

observed trends ( for more than a third of a century now ) are all less those modeled. To achieve the rates you cited (2 to 6 C), temperature trends would have to accelerate. But, forcing growth rates peaked two decades ago. And given that CO2 emissions rates have peaked in most developed nations, and the logarithmic nature of forcing, there’s little physical basis for imagining an acceleration of temperature trends.

Now, to be fair, my own bias is showing: I should have added an entry to the table – climate change denier would be one that denies any radiative forcing, so they should be at the bottom – 0.0C/century, which is also clearly wrong (although the UAH MT rate is closer to this than any of the other scenarios ).

But wrong too are the high end projections and those that cling to them are in denial of the data.

What a very small blogoshere it is. The very same commentators – most of whom I blithely ignore – making the very same comments on the very same trivial points.

The physics are relatively simple conceptually. Greenhouse gas molecules resonate with IR emissions in certain frequencies. Excited greenhouse gas molecules collide with nitrogen and oxygen such there a local thermal equilibrium evolves. Greenhouse gas molecules may also gain kinetic energy from adjacent molecules and emit in IR. Add more greenhouse gas molecules and the number of interactions with IR photons increases. IR photons are absorbed and subsequently emitted in all directions – both the surface and the atmosphere warm tending to a new conditional equilibrium at TOA.

Physics is not about equations as such – these are merely another way of conceptualising process. And probably not the way exceptional physicists – or exceptional anything – primarily work.

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. …. This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

Albert Einstein

The simple fact is that increased greenhouse gs concentrations in the atmosphere increase temperatures – all other things being equal. Nothing more can be reasonably said. It can be shown by experiment and observation at laboratory and planetary scales.

Differences would exist even in a warmer equilibrium state due to deflection of photon paths in a greenhouse gas enriched atmosphere. By the nature of the observing instruments.

All other things are never equal – in the complexity of the Earth system. Complexity science suggests that the system is pushed by such things as solar intensity and Earth orbital eccentricities – past a threshold at which stage the components start to interact chaotically in multiple and changing negative and positive feedbacks – as tremendous energies cascade through powerful subsystems. Some of these changes have a regularity within broad limits and the planet responds with a broad regularity in changes of ice, cloud, Atlantic thermohaline circulation and ocean and atmospheric circulation. Complexity involving abrupt and unpredictable changes in system state evolves from interactions of simple components.

The bottom line is that we are making changes to a complex system with unknowable consequences – that may include warming or cooling surprises. Global warming is by no means guaranteed. The knowable future includes more or less extreme climate shifts every 20 to 30 years. The policy basis can’t therefore be defined by sensitivity or any other simplistic prognostication. It can only be characterised as decision making in uncertainty. Climate shifts are unmistakably evident in climate data and unmissable by the apocryphal 10 year old. It seems the epitome of climate ignorance to even talk global warming and not abrupt climate change.

One thing seems pretty certain – the future will look pretty much like the past – extreme. For comparison – red intensity for the 97/98 El Nino was 99.

Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed. For example, roughly half the north Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved in only a decade, and it was accompanied by significant climatic changes across most of the globe. Similar events, including local warmings as large as 16°C, occurred repeatedly during the slide into and climb out of the last ice age. Human civilizations arose after those extreme, global ice-age climate jumps. Severe droughts and other regional climate events during the current warm period have shown similar tendencies of abrupt onset and great persistence, often with adverse effects on societies.

Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly. Thus, greenhouse warming and other human alterations of the earth system may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events. The abrupt changes of the past are not fully explained yet, and climate models typically underestimate the size, speed, and extent of those changes. Hence, future abrupt changes cannot be predicted with confidence, and climate surprises are to be expected.

The new paradigm of an abruptly changing climatic system has been well established by research over the last decade, but this new thinking is little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of natural and social scientists and policy-makers.

It suggests that emissions are potentially problematic – but that a rational response begins by accurately defining the problem. Electricity generations plays a relatively small part in the bigger emissions picture – that include contributions to forcing from black carbon.

To build an effective policy response to uncertainty, complexity and instability in the climate system – and addressing the broad range of emissions – requires a far more broad ranging policy framework. Sadly not pointless point scoring by climate warriors who mostly seem not to understand all that much.

I’m puzzled by this entire discussion. According to Webster, the word-that-shall-not-be-uttered dates back to the 15th century. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the Holocaust, but (not being a Holocaust “skeptic”) I do know that it took place in the 20th century. So you-know-what had been in use for 5 centuries before there was a Nazi party. It seems to me that that the faux outrage over the use of that-which-shall-not-be-named is a transparent attempt to shame those who are using a perfectly good and legitimate descriptive term. Or maybe it’s just a sign of remarkable lack of etymological literacy combined with thin-skinned readiness to take offense, like those who have gotten the word “niggardly” banned from college campuses.

That said, I am glad that (for the most part) the word “skeptic” has been put in quotes by commenters on this blog. As it turns out, most of the world’s most prominent skeptics agree with the scientific consensus (see http://bit.ly/1G0gTPf) . So if we are going to ban a word that is being used improperly and out of context, perhaps it should be the “s-word”).

This sort of comment shows what appears to be willful obtuseness of people defending the use of the word “denier.” Everybody knows the meanings of words change over time. Everyone can think of words which are now considered vile slurs even though that’s not what they meant a few hundred years ago. You won’t see people say it’s fine to use these words because 200 years ago they meant something else.

If a call a person an “idiot” today, am I saying they’re retarded? No. That the word was once used to refer to mentally handicapped people does not mean it still does. In the same way, whether or not “denier” had a meaning before Holocaust deniers came about has does not determine what the word means today. Words are defined primarily by their accepted usage. The only question is whether or not people commonly interpret “denier” as an association with the Holocaust. If they do, it’s a real meaning for the word.

Given there has been effort by people in the global warming discussion to associate “denier” with the Holocaust, and given many people have stated they perceive such an association, I don’t see how one can argue it’s not a real association. People used the word with a particular intended meaning. Other people interpreted it as having that particular meaning. That’s exactly how definitions are created.

I guess if you are very adamant about literal interpretations, then you should probably note that the literal phrase “climate change d…r” applies to a vanishingly small set of people. I would suggest that the phrase “climate d….r” encompasses a null set.

I would be interested in knowing what you’re best literal phrase would be for the people you are intending to target.

It was a legitimate word, legitimately used. Then it got hijacked for political purposes. Pity that the value of the word has been lessened by its linkage to the Holocaust. Blame those who found it effective in dismissing their opponents.

When you adopt a strategy of refusing to debate your opponents, you need to find some way of responding to their arguments. Linking them with skinhead thugs is one way.

Tom, I don’t remember the form “climate change d****r” being used at all before the great and the good (or at least the famous) had made the equivalence with Holocaust d****l absolutely explicit, witness the list provided by Popular Technology last year or the history of the term from Marc Sheppard in 2007 (both easy to find on this thread). If so d****r was for me fatally tainted from birth. Could you give examples of this “legitimate word, legitimately used” in the climate debate before explicit equivalence with so-called “Holocaust revisionism” had been claimed?

No. I can’t. My (perhaps misphrased) comment was that the ‘d’ word was used extensively before the climate debate. The Consensus may never win the climate wars, but they can at least be proud that they trashed a word.

I must admit that I am partial to space cadet – short for cult of AGW groupthink space cadet and the redoubtable slayers of sky dragons – sky dragons for short. Neither of whom seem all that interesting.

Much more so dragon-kings but that is perhaps a whole different and saner pursuit.

‘We develop the concept of “dragon-kings” corresponding to meaningful outliers, which are found to coexist with power laws in the distributions of event sizes under a broad range of conditions in a large variety of systems. These dragon-kings reveal the existence of mechanisms of self-organization that are not apparent otherwise from the distribution of their smaller siblings. We present a generic phase diagram to explain the generation of dragon-kings and document their presence in six different examples (distribution of city
sizes, distribution of acoustic emissions associated with material failure, distribution of velocity increments in hydrodynamic turbulence, distribution of financial drawdowns, distribution of the energies of epileptic seizures in humans and in model animals, distribution of the earthquake energies). We emphasize the importance of understanding dragon-kings as being often associated with a neighborhood of what can be called equivalently a phase transition, a bifurcation, a catastrophe (in the sense of René Thom), or a
tipping point.’ http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0907/0907.4290.pdf

In such a complex system – only data is of much interest. There was an ENSO dragon-king in 1997/2000 – followed by a significant climate shift.

Several words that have a clear meaning according to dictionaries have been linked to a social or controversial issue so strongly that the normal use of the word is effectively inhibited. This case is not unique. When no good substitutes are available this may become a problem. Perhaps the best choice would be to fight that development by continuing to use the word, but in several cases that’s not accepted, I think that we might find even examples, where the use of a previously ordinary word has become illegal in some country.

The verb deny seems to be non-problematic, denial has also a clear meaning in psychology, the problems appear, when the words that refer to a person (d..e, d..list) , are used. That has also the real problem of approaching ad hominem argumentation. Some number of expression of views is used to label the person, and labeling the person is used to dismiss everything (s)he says.

The argumentation on the use of some words is, however, not at the core of the problems. It’s more important to understand, how natural it is that people do not always accept best scientific knowledge. It’s more important to understand that the best scientific knowledge does not have the role in perception that people like to imagine it has. Every person has learned that she cannot base her thinking fully on facts and logic. She has learned that apparent facts are also often contradictory.

The thinking and perception is a very different and holistic process, where backwards logic wins often over forward logic. By that I mean that we tend to trust more in our final conclusions than in the facts and logic that might determine the conclusions. When it’s claimed that our conclusions contradict the facts, we do not change the conclusions, we deny the value of the facts, and express that often as a denial of some particular fact. Such a claim may be explicitly wrong, but that’s not of real importance as we picked the fact to deny more or less randomly. We knew perhaps that our claim may be weak, but we were sure that some of the arguments of the opposing side are wrong, if not that particular one then some others.

The post of SoD explains well trough the satire, how easy it is to think like that about the climate change issue. The full logical connections from science to policy is so complex – and genuinely involves such uncertainties – that it leaves opportunities for very different policy conclusions even, when nothing is denied in the science and other knowledge.

“Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.”

– George Monbiot, The Guardian (2006)

The word denier of course has existed for a long time and means other things in context, deficit denier, darwin denier, etc, but that is a distraction..

When it is used in the context of the climate debate, it has a number of associations, including climate deniers are the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers..

in the 80-90’s green groups were saying politicians, public were in ‘denial’ of climate change. and there was a theme was the coming climate catastrophe would be worse than any holocaust.. and that the public (like the Jews) were in denial about what was to befall them. (George Marshall, ex Greenpeace, Rainforest Foundation, Earth First, RisingTide) – 2001 Ecologist

Which then appears to morphed among activists into those that question, must be bad, mad as sad as holocaust deniers, or creationists or cranks or conspiracy theorists.. a pretty standard activist/political trick to associate your opposition with a label, that nobody would like to be labelled with (to shut them up)

The very real David Irving trial (a real holocaust denier) came to prominence in UK/EU at least, and a number of writers made the comparison.. Not least writers Johann Hari, George Monbiot and Mark Lynas (both environmental activists)

The Guardian (in 2010) recognized the well established problems and associations of using the phrase climate denier, or denier in the context of the climate debate.. and had internal arguments about it’s use

they are well aware of it!, because George Monbiot was making the comparison as far back as 2006 (in the Guardian). Irving was still in the news at this time.

“Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.”

– George Monbiot, The Guardian (2006)

“The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers. …they are nudging close to having the moral credibility of Holocaust deniers.”

– Johann Hari, The Independent (2005)

“I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put this in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial.”

– Mark Lynas, Environmental Activist (2006)

or in America:

“It’s about the climate-change “denial industry”, …we should have war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

– David Roberts, Grist Magazine (2006)

“These are not debunkers, testing outrageous claims with scientific rigor. They are deniers – like Holocaust deniers.”

– Jim Hoggan, DeSmogBlog (2005)

“Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier?”

– Joe Romm, Climate Progress (2012)

also a concern to see UK politicians making similar analogies

“Giving in to the forces of low ambition would be an act of climate appeasement. This is our Munich moment.”

– Chris Huhne, U.K. Energy and Climate Change Minister (2011)

As for Lindzen, ‘liking’ it… well most people don’t, and just maybe the sight of a scientist with a Jewish background, trying to (rather desperately) repatriate the word into something else, isn’t rather sad/tragic, really shows how desperate people are to keep hold of a label they like to use to discredit people in the eyes of the public..

Mosher summarises with some irony..(about the apparent desire to never concede any point, on any issue, to any sceptic, ever)

Steven Mosher says:

February 4, 2015 at 6:58 pm

“The term denier is saving the planet.
don’t give it up. the cause depends on it.”

The offensiveness of the phrase is really the intent of the person using it, to discredit people, and they will happily use what ever association floats the boats of a particular audience. If their was a worse comparison than holocaust denial (that would also be used)

“Would the media insist on having a Holocaust-denier to balance any report about the Second Word War?”

Barry, thanks for pointing out Mosher’s ironic instructions to the faithful. Brilliant.

I agree with all you say except your characterisation of Lindzen’s response. I’ve always loved his sarcastic appropriation of Climate D****r for himself. Just like Lawrence Solomon using it as the title of his book. It helps of course that these guys are Jewish. Any response that shows rightful contempt for this phrase is fine by me.

Not sure it’s possible to describe the sanctimony any better than Keith Kloor does himself:

kkloor Mod DavidAppell • 10 hours ago
You don’t see it because you’re in d.nial, plain and simple.

Although Judith Curry does give it a shot:

curryja | October 14, 2014 at 5:45 pm | ReplyYes, they confuse extreme weather events as being caused by anthropogenic global warming. I would call them extreme weather deniers – they seem to be in denial that these are caused naturally.

Not sure it’s possible to describe the sanctimony any better than Keith Kloor does himself:

kkloor Mod DavidAppell • 10 hours ago
You don’t see it because you’re in d.nial, plain and simple.

Although Judith Curry does give it a shot:

curryja | October 14, 2014 at 5:45 pm | ReplyYes, they confuse extreme weather events as being caused by anthropogenic global warming. I would call them extreme weather d*niers – they seem to be in d*nial that these are caused naturally.

Note that Judy Curry has never compared the people who disagree with her on extreme weather events (and the IPCC, as it happens, in this case) with holocaust d*niers. The phrase extreme weather d*niers is a clear allusion to the evil and stupid usage from consensus central which is a clear allusion to the Holocaust case. I don’t agree with Judy’s acceptance of d*nier in the debate – I’m with SoD on that. But don’t confuse sarcastic echoing of the haters and with the hate itself.

I am not convinced of the equivalence, maybe in some cases, but I still don’t care. It’s either their moral poverty, a projection (climate change or global warming d****l) or just plain silly (climate d****l).

Not engaging as a tactic doesn’t always work well. It can be argued that the relatively recent resurgence of creationism, in the form that is called creation science, gained a lot of traction because evolutionary biologists initially ignored it.

OTOH, I see a lot of funding on the other side, Tom Steyer for one. $75 million pretty much down the drain in 2014 alone from him. And then there’s George Soros… The Koch brothers are pocket change to Soros.

Peoplewhodontagreeus-ists – we all know the words. Again, no thanks. Usually these words are created as insults. What’s the point? We are looking into the pros and cons of the science.

Political affiliation – just because someone might be a [political party 1] or a [political party 2] doesn’t mean anything – not in science terms. So it’s irrelevant.

Motivations – how and why various groups or individuals might benefit financially from some point of view being true, false, falsely claimed to be true, etc – all irrelevant.

And I’ve been putting my “shutting down the conversation” into practice as well, as the spam filter has been putting comments into the moderation queue that contain:

d..r
id..t

and many other name-calling terms.

You have correctly understood my masterplan to “shut down conversation”. I have enforced people questioning science rather than motives, and using ideas, concepts and arguments rather than name-calling.

It has been very effective. We get a lot less “conversation” here on Science of Doom than most other climate blogs. The sheer dullness drives a lot of people away.

I don’t think that it is the dullness per se. It is because you are talking about the science, and doing so at a level beyond the comprehension of all but a relative few. Most people aren’t actually “motivated” (in the sense of “motivated reasoning” – which is not actually an assessment of motives, but an assessment of reasoning) by the science, but by the identity politics. That’s why this thread has so many comments. And of those who are interested in the science, the level of this blog is beyond the comprehension of most.

Let’s be clear what I and many other climate dissenters are looking for: for Denier never to used in the climate context again, just as Nigger is considered completely unacceptable in many contexts, though it is allowable in some. On the latter see the thoughts of a young black here

I used the analogy with nigger with a well-known UK climate scientist on Twitter on Sunday. That didn’t go down too well at the start:

I continue to think the analogy is fair, though like all analogies it can be pushed too far. Certainly, though, if a white man argued “it only means black in Latin-based languages and that’s all I mean by it” he’d be given short shrift. The many explicit assertions of equivalence with Holocaust denial are, for me, easily enough for people of conscience to reach the conclusion that Denier should be just as taboo in the climate context. I’m grateful for Mark and others who have backed off using it, despite our perhaps deep disagreements on other matters of climate science and policy.

If you have no soul and no empathy for the suffering of millions of black Africans who were kidnapped, enslaved, beaten, and lynched, keep pretending that your offense at people who use the ‘d-word’ is just bad as their pain from racists, bigots, slaveholders, and lynch mobs who have uttered the ‘n-word’.

I think you need to read this whole thread far more carefully. What SoD wrote originally was this:

I can’t find words to describe how I feel about the apologists for the Nazi regime, and those who deny that the holocaust took place. The evidence for the genocide is overwhelming and everyone can understand it.

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

There’s nothing here about my or anyone else’s “offense at people who use the ‘d-word’”. The past suffering of black people is I agree the reason that Nigger has become completely unacceptable from white people, especially in North America, today. The much more recent and even greater suffering of Jews, Gypsies and other unfortunates under Hitler is the reason never to use the D-word of climate dissidents. As I said, no analogy is perfect but this one is close enough to make people stop and think – and led in this case to one well-known UK climate scientist saying he wouldn’t use the D-word again.

The common element, in other words, isn’t the offence the person on the receiving end of the N-word or the D-word feels. It’s the contempt any well-adjusted person feels on hearing it, because of the lack of sensitivity to the past suffering of blacks during the slavery era or the Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust. That’s the common element.

I think you are making the wrong comparison. There are people who take offense at the word “niggardly” because it reminds them of the n-word. The term “global warming denier” apparently reminds you of “Holocaust denier” regardless of the intent of the speaker. I’m sure there are people who use the word “niggardly” now as an insult because of the way it sounds, and because of the reaction it gets. But it’s seems ignorant and silly to think that most people are using it with the intent to be interpreted that way.

Re-posting because I accidentally used the dreaded d-word. Amazing that the n-word is ok on the blog but the d-ward isn’t. What does that say?

I think you are making the wrong comparison. There are people who take offense at the word “niggardly” because it reminds them of the n-word. The term “global warming dee-nye-er” apparently reminds you of “Holocaust dee-nye-er” regardless of the intent of the speaker. I’m sure there are people who use the word “niggardly” now as an insult because of the way it sounds, and because of the reaction it gets. But it’s seems ignorant and silly to think that most people are using it with the intent to be interpreted that way.

Amazing that the n-word is ok on the blog but the d-ward isn’t. What does that say?

a) The blog owner is very nasty or completely inconsistent in application of right-thinking principles
b) It never occurred to the blog owner to add it to the filter because no one ever used it on this blog.

The analogy between someone taking offence at niggardly (reference please) and the pervasive smear for climate dissenters of being compared to Holocaust deniers, since 2007 especially, is not close enough to be worth any of my own time.

I’ve been told on Twitter that the following is a comment from John Cook of Skeptical Science fame in 2007 (I’ve not checked – there are many other such observations):

Apparently in a flame war, there’s no greater insult than comparing your opponent to Nazis. I’ve been following the global warming argument closely of late and I’ve noticed both sides often fulfill Godwin’s Law. Global warming advocates liken skeptics to Holocaust deniers (akin to a Nazi). Skeptics compare Al Gore’s public awareness campaign to Nazi-like propoganda.

There is something odd about the global warming debate — or the climate change debate, as we are now expected to call it, since global warming has for the time being come to a halt.

I have never shied away from controversy, nor — for example, as Chancellor — worried about being unpopular if I believed that what I was saying and doing was in the public interest.

But I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification which I — along with other dissenters, of course — have received for my views on global warming and global warming policies.

For example, according to the Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, the global warming dissenters are, without exception, “wilfully ignorant” and in the view of the Prince of Wales we are “headless chickens”. Not that “dissenter” is a term they use. We are regularly referred to as “climate change deniers”, a phrase deliberately designed to echo “Holocaust denier” — as if questioning present policies and forecasts of the future is equivalent to casting malign doubt about a historical fact.

The heir to the throne and the minister are senior public figures, who watch their language. The abuse I received after appearing on the BBC’s Today programme last February was far less restrained. Both the BBC and I received an orchestrated barrage of complaints to the effect that it was an outrage that I was allowed to discuss the issue on the programme at all. And even the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons shamefully joined the chorus of those who seek to suppress debate.

I’m sure this quote will bring out every claimed misstep from the UK’s ex-chancellor, who is Jewish, in the eyes of his opponents. But is that really good enough? Is ‘a phrase deliberately designed to echo “Holocaust denier”‘ really appropriate for such an important debate of science and policy? Isn’t it a clear insult to the memories of the real victims, recently commemorated on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz?

I get that you’re saying it isn’t deliberately designed to echo such a thing. As long as the individual speaker denies it is so designed. Can I clarify please that if the comparison with Holocaust denier is explicit, or confirmed by the speaker, you profoundly disagree with it?

My libertarian streak says: No language police, period. I stipulate this word is a personal insult to you.

Q: What good could possibly come from this open borders on language policy?

A: It makes those who are emotionally entangled on an issue easy to identify.

For example, I think many people simply stop reading once this word is trotted out and move on. The rest of the message is pretty predictable after this.

Those who are overheated on the climate issue who use the d word with malicious intent are going to feel the same way if a word ban went into affect. Nothing really changed. They would probably start using skeptic in scare quotes which everyone would then know meant d….r.

Of course SoD has the right to construct any language police filter on his blog he deems appropriate, that’s a different story.

Tom, we’re plunged into Charlie Hebdo and what the Pope, among others, said about them, at this point, if we’re not careful. I’m talking about a taboo that I believe should be in place in polite company, for exactly the reasons SoD gives in the main point. One reason I included the video of the black youth talking about who can and can’t say Nigger is that the taboo, even in that case, is more complex than it seems. But, basically, I back that taboo and believe the same should apply with the D-word. All human cultures ever discovered have had taboos. I believe civilisation is enhanced by the right ones. But I also respect the high value our own culture has inculcated in you and me for open debate. Bring it on!

I see lots of questions here – and elsewhere because apparently the subject is being discussed currently in other blogs – what on earth do we call these people if we can’t use d..r?

It’s a conundrum.

I have an amazing suggestion, a little obscure, from the Lexicon.

If you think someone is wrong, how about “wrong”.

Let’s do a worked example. Instead of saying “These people are climate science d..rs“, try “These people are wrong about climate“.

And, to make it really hard hitting: “These people are completely wrong about climate“.

And, if you are convinced that their motives are evil, come out and say it:

Instead of saying “These people are climate science d..rs“, try “These people are wrong about climate and they know it”

If you want to make it more colorful, instead of “These people are climate science d..rs“, try “These people wouldn’t know the quasi-biennial oscillation or its importance in climate if it bit them on the arse“. Obviously, you couldn’t use that particular one on Richard Lindzen (seeing as he kind of figured it out), but I’m sure there’s another one for him.

SoD – not sure about your sarcasm ability, but the idea of branding “these people” with some bad term or another is what brought up the D storm in the first place. So “these people are wrong” sounds like a cop-out.

What’s ironic though, is that you are the one who is 100% skeptical of ANY certainty. If the IPCC believes sensitivity to be in the 1.5-4.5C range, and a lukewarmer places it in the 1.1-2.5C range more or less, I understand you would not bet on anything narrower than “-5C to 5C” or something of the sort (“I have no idea whether the mean value is too high or low, or whether the range is too wide or too narrow” – that’s your stated opinion).

Couldn’t disagree more, omnologos, despite my gratitude to you for bringing this thread to my attention one sleepy Wednesday morning in London. Just yesterday was that? Woah. Can we go back to Science of Doom being dull again soon, please, SoD?

For me the host’s just being practical here. Some people want to say we’re wrong, some want to imply that our motives are bad, others want to tell me that I wouldn’t know the quasi-biennial oscillation if it bit me on the arse. All so true (in their mind at least) and all so possible to communicate without dragging in as attempted bolstering of one’s team the millions who perished in one of the worst atrocities in history.

One step at a time. And this, for me, since around 2007, has seemed one of the biggest positive steps it would be possible to take in the climate debate.

This blog will try and stay away from guessing motives and insulting people because of how they vote or their religious beliefs.

However, this doesn’t mean we won’t use satire now and again as it can make the day more interesting.

It was satire again at work. I need to improve my satire ability.

Or maybe, the fact that people think I’m serious when I’m actually using satire means it’s working.

Yes, I’ll run with that.

..Are you one of the wrongs? If not, why not?

It’s mostly the wrong questions on blogs.

I don’t believe in camps, teams or any of the ridiculous stuff that is 99.9% of the political discussion of climate – that is, the “discussion” which is seen in the media and in blogs.

I’d like to understand climate science. That’s it.

The list of things I know I don’t understand is very long – starting with conservation of potential vorticity and baroclinic instabilities explaining the extra-tropical lapse rate in meteorology, moving to what the deep ocean pore hole d18O says about the quality of the d18O proxies found in benthic foraminifera and pretty much lots of subjects covering all the different aspects of climate science. Oh, and all of chemistry.

There’s probably a very long list of things I think I understand ok but actually don’t really understand.

So yes, I am almost certainly one of the wrongs, if that helps you to have a great day.

I think that the solution is rather simple, in a sense. Don’t label people. Talk about the arguments that people make. Yes, at some point labels are useful for talking about the basic groups that are engaged in the debate, but that is not the function of most of labeling, such as the D-word, or “alarmist’ or “warmist” or “Lyesnkist” or “cultist” or “McCarthyist,” blah, blah, blah. Those aren’t labels used for good faith categorization. They are for use as pejoratives. The analogies aren’t for explication. They are for rhetorical squabbles.

The ubiquitous labeling speaks to the character of the discussion that moves people towards identity politics – identity-aggression and identity-defense. The questions being discussed are more about “who people are” than “what they know” or “what they believe.” Identity-related behaviors are associated with “motivated reasoning” and “cultural cognition.”

But while the solution is simple in concept, it is difficult in practice.

It is nice to see that your history is one of distinguishing your engagement from the typical identity politics. Here’s to you continuing in that vane.

The word “wrong” implies a passive erroneous approach rather than a quite serious effort to distort and undermine science and the scientific process. “Wrong” suggests the potential for an actual skeptic — someone questioning who is ready/able to incorporate evidence and information to change their opinion and perspective. Sadly, this is simply not the case with a very large share of those who have earned the title of “climate science d…rs”.

Using the ‘d’ word was a political alternative to engaging with the opponents of the consensus.

When veterans of the tobacco wars advised allies that debating climate science was a losing strategy, it left them with few alternatives to one-way messaging.

Broadcasting messages proved difficult, especially as many of the messages were not crafted by scientists. After some errors had to be acknowledged in vehicles such as An Inconvenient Truth, for example, green NGOs began creating and financing campaigns, as if climate science were a consumer product. This led to imagery such as polar bears on ice floes, close-up pictures of mosquitos, Amazon rainforests being cut down, etc. Later these were joined by more bizarre examples such as the No Pressure video.

But because they were one-way messages, those employing this strategy found it difficult to respond to those on the other side of the policy fence. Often(not always) the consensus team was right on the facts of a particular issue, but couldn’t organize a one-way message in real time.

One of the strategems to bulwark their decision not to engage with opponents was deligitimizing them. We see the results today.

It was not just the use of the ‘d’ word, by the way. Another tactic was pointing out the age of the scientists who spoke out against the consensus, using things like ‘gone emeritus’ etc.

Another was the use of carefully crafted literature searches to create the impression of an overwhelming consensus–the 97%, as opposed to merely the 81% that is closer to the truth. Oreskes, Prall, Cook–all of their signature pages were based on research designed to ignore relevant work by their opponents, not measure it.

To be clear–it is not scientists at fault for this strategy. A group of politically concerned activists took the microphones out of the hands of scientists and began insulting their opponents instead of discussing the science.

I would ask scientists (I’ve said all this to Bart Verheggen at his place of business) if it is not time to reclaim the microphone, ‘thank’ the activists for their efforts and ask them to leave the stage.

In history, the term “revisionist” is frequently used to denote a historian or school of thought that contradicts the consensus. For example, we now have the orthodox, revisionist and post-revisionist schools of thought about the Cold War. Post-revisionism became a necessity when new data (documents from Soviet archives) became available after the Cold War ended.

The term climate change revisionist would be non-insulting way to refer to those who don’t believe: the IPCC’s central estimate of 3 or greater for climate sensitivity, that limiting total anthropogenic warming to 2 degC is essential, or that industrialized countries should cut CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050. “Lukewarmer” is already a perfectly good term for this group, but the term is not widely understood. “Climate change revisionist” makes it clear that one is challenging the consensus without denying established science.

Our host appears to be a Milankovitch revisionist. One could speculate that the authors of Otto (2013) might be the beginning of a substantial school of revisionist thought in academic climate science, since they acknowledged a substantial body of evidence indicating that ECS could be well below 3 degC.

Holocaust deniers call themselves revisionists and for that reason, alone, I think one should look elsewhere. But why does anyone need another label? As SoD says elsewhere ‘wrong’ with the optional rider ‘wrong and they know it’ are surely adequate.

Joshua – you would not call SoD a D, but I am sure you would call me. Why? Because you only work on motives – the motives you imagine are behind my choice and SoD’s.

It’s quite obvious really. There is nothing I can say to make you change your mind about me, because you are absolutely convinced you know my motives – even if I pretended to agree with you, you would concoct some story about me dissimulating because of those same motives.

==> “Joshua – you would not call SoD a D, but I am sure you would call me. ”

Really? Are you sure? Interesting. I don’t use the term. Never have. Never will

==> “Why? Because you only work on motives – the motives you imagine are behind my choice and SoD’s.”

The reason don’t use the term is because its use relies on judging motives. I have made that argument many times – that its use is fallacious because it requires the judging of motives and/or psychology about people that you don’t even know.

Will you reevaluate your assumptions, given that they have lead you rather spectacularly astray?

Joshua, I put you to the back of the queue of folk who paid me the privilege of replying to my earlier comments. I felt you were different from the rest and now I know why. Thank you for never using the D-word. I’m sure your criticisms of or questions for me can stand the scrutiny of others without me needing to throw up a defence. Though I might respond after other things seem to have settled down. Once again, thank you for making the right choice, as I am sure it is, even if others with Jewish names, like Nick Cohen in London, deeply disagree.

I did, quite a while back, in a search for adequate terminology, use a descriptor that had “d*nier” at the end of a range of potential views (just as I had “believer” – a term that I reject because it is pejorative – at the other end of the range) – but never used it as a descriptor for individuals – because I could not know how an individual reaches his/her view. And I dropped even that a long time ago.

Using it is pointless, IMO, and only reveals weak reasoning (as does the use of alarmist/warmist/believer, etc.) IMO, its use is sub-optimal at best, and quite likely counterproductive.

[…] and after giving you a stern warning about Crimes Against Gaia, accusing you of perpetrating a future Holocaust worse than Hitler, leave you shivering and hungry in the kitchen, the charge of “Climate Criminal!” […]

To Windchasers- I would say that you are missing the most obvious and important characteristic of skeptics. They emphasize the data and believe the data shows no suggestion of CAGW,
To verytallguy and others- The many well known attacks on skeptics by comparing them to Holocaust d—- (see Tom Scharf’s many examples at 8:35 PM, and there are others) has poisoned the well.

SOD, It’s a sad testimony on the state of climate change science discussion that this post was necessary. It’s an even sadder commentary that many here don’t get it.

I find it hard to believe that “Many of the world’s notable and prominent skeptics” accept that GCMs are reliable as a forecasting tool on the 50 year time scale. In fact I would expect the scientific consensus is generally reevaluating its position in this regard. I trust you are as sceptic – it is as they say in the observations.

However the issue here isn’t “dee-nye-rs [being referred to] as ‘skeptics'”, it’s the other way round.

It sounds to me like you are confused about what scientific skepticism is. There is no reason to call skeptics “d*niers” because skeptics are not in d*nial about the reality of human-caused global warming.Skeptical organizations, like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, consider global warming d*nial to be a form of pseudoscience.

“There is no reason to call skeptics “d*niers” because skeptics are not in d*nial about the reality of human-caused global warming.”

But it sounds as though many of the so called sceptics are in d..nial over the uncertainty associated with the extent and significance of human-cause global warming, so perhaps this particular group (eg the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) should be called d.ers, at least in the Freudian sense?

To Windchasers- I would say that you are missing the most obvious and important characteristic of skeptics. They emphasize the data and believe the data shows no suggestion of CAGW,

I definitely agree that they do this, I just don’t see it as important. Both sides emphasize the data and believe it demonstrates their point.

But in my experience, data is generally un-ambiguous, provided you actually know what you’re doing. (And when it’s not: well, that’s the cutting edge of science).

But most of the skeptics that I personally know have actually shown that they can’t critically analyze the arguments and data. For instance, talking about the temperature adjustments: I think they’re pretty straightforward, just some basic statistics. But the skeptics I know don’t accept them, not because they can show that the statistics are wrong, but because they just distrust them. If you ask them why they don’t believe, if you really question them, this ignorance comes out. They don’t know why the adjustments are wrong: they just are.

It was arguments about “the pause” that made this really hit home… “the pause” being that stretch of time over which the surface warming trend has not been significantly different from zero.

But in what other field of science would people argue that a statistically insignificant stretch of data supported their claims? That’s all manner of backwards. Statistical insignificance means you can’t reject either hypothesis under consideration. It doesn’t help you show that warming is false. There’s absolutely no ambiguity about that: it’s a very, very bad argument. But because “no statistically significant warming” sounds like “no warming”, well, that’s truthy enough.

When someone is making conclusions from statistical insignificance, there’s probably no hope for a reasonable discussion. There’s just too big of a gap.

It’s textbook Dunning-Krueger: they don’t realize they’re applying bad reasoning, and they’ll resist any attempts to rectify it, even if we’re just talking about math that was developed in the 1800s.

A slope of temperature anomaly vs time that is indistinguishable from zero for more than a decade is, however, evidence that the probability that the ensemble of GCM’s is significantly overestimating climate sensitivity to forcing is in the very likely range, not to mention other problems like non-linearity to forcing that leads to equilibrium sensitivity being much higher than transient sensitivity.

A slope of temperature anomaly vs time that is indistinguishable from zero for more than a decade is, however, evidence that the probability that the ensemble of GCM’s is significantly overestimating climate sensitivity to forcing is in the very likely range

Nope, it’s not. If the data were significantly close to zero, that’d be one thing, but the data from the last ~15 years also doesn’t show a significant change in trend from the 1980s-1990s.

Really, there’s just not many conclusions you can draw from noisy data. I certainly don’t see how you can say “well, there’s been more noise than the models predicted, so therefore the models are biased too high”. That appears to be a non-sequitur.

At best, you might conclude that the models underestimate the natural variability on the timescale of 1-2 decades. But that’s a comparison of the amount of interdecadal noise in models and reality, not a comparison of the trend. Those two problems are somewhat orthogonal, and you can’t draw many conclusions about average trend from conclusions about the noise, or vice versa.

You would be correct if the GCM ensemble time series trend were also not significantly different from zero, but if you had been paying attention and not just trying to score debating points, you would know that the ensemble slope is significantly different from zero. The difference in slopes between measured and predicted is significant at greater than 90%, very close to 95%. And that’s correcting for the reduced degrees of freedom due to serial autocorrelation in both series.

Anecdote: Every time I discuss the mathematics of climate science with my students it does not take long before the question arises: “Are you a d…er?”

It is a personal attack on me. It has happened tons of times. I usually politely ask “why do you ask if I deny something?” and 100% of the time the response is that I am questioning global warming.

My response is: if it is mathematically based just studying it should be a plus not a negative (as they imply) and asking questions of “why this here?” and “what basis does this have?” should be encouraged not shocking questioned. But they ask “are you a d…er?” when they realize that I am looking at the data and equations and not just taking the conclusion of the paper for granted and hence studying the mathematics and data is an attack on their goodness and soul. They inevitable always ask: “don’t you want to save the world.” and can not comprehend that I am studying the argument the world needs to be saved, and finding serious flaws with the enourmous machine called climate science.

The larger the machine the more difficult it is to understand the harder it is to expect it to work in an understandable way and in a predictive way!

It is their use, in this setting that is common place, that creates the negative impact and an attack by this word.

I propose a new class and label: Global Warming Cynic. GWC’s accept the science, but refuse to believe that anything that would actually significantly reduce the rate of global CO2 emissions will happen in their lifetime for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with any “well funded campaign to d**y that humans are having any significant deleterious effect on earth’s climate.” Hard core GWC’s believe that the rate of CO2 emissions will continue to increase for decades.

As evidence, take the attitude toward nuclear power. It’s currently the only proven technology that can reliably produce base load carbon free (well, except for the CO2 released from making the cement to build the plant) electricity. But it’s anathema. Germany is closing down it’s nuclear power plants and building wind and solar plants. But wind and solar are so intermittent that they have to burn lignite as back up. As a result, German CO2 emissions are, IIRC, increasing and electric power rates for the consumer have doubled or tripled.

GWC’s also don’t believe the hype that much better batteries are just around the corner.

Of course, those of us paying attention to other science – demographics, economics – have been telling the world about this. China reached peak working age about five years ago and will have a slowing economy ( like the rest of the developed world ) for decades:

The bottom line, which would be good news for those not consumed by doom, is this – even constant CO2 accumulation rates would mean slowing temperature increases ( logarithmic response ). In addition, we’ll have decreasing accumulation within 15 years.

I question the assertion that India’s per capita CO2 emissions will not increase and remain below China.

I need to dig out my spreadsheet and run the numbers, but a plateau in CO2 emission does not mean that atmospheric CO2 concentration stops rising immediately. The rise will continue, but will eventually stabilize at a higher level. It won’t come down until after global emissions decrease.

China has shale gas deposits that are estimated as being larger than the US. Replacing coal with gas will lower emissions in the short term, but not in the long term if energy use continues to rise.

I was incorrect. There is no steady state as long as emissions exceed the rate of removal by weathering, oceanic precipitation and subduction. If, for example, CO2 emissions had been frozen at 2005 levels, by 2040, the atmospheric CO2 level would be over 440ppmv and still increasing at over 1.6ppmv/year. By 2100, it would be over 530ppmv and still increasing at nearly 1.4 ppmv/year.

But, of course, they weren’t. Even if CO2 emissions plateau before 2020, those concentrations will be still be achieved, and sooner. Decarbonization of an economy is much slower and more expensive than realized by most. Try reading Pielke, Jr.’s The Climate Fix. The idea that a magical solution just around the corner is a fantasy.

Even a constant rate of increase in CO2 means a slowing of forcing and lower rates of warming.

The rate of removal from the atmosphere has increased,
(only 40% of emissions remaining ‘airborne for 2014):

If emissions do begin declining by 2030, the ‘airborne fraction’ will decrease even further because the amount being photosynthesized or absorbed stays high based on availability, not emissions.

The point is, observed warming is at rates all lower than models predicted,
and is likely to proceed at still lower rates going forward, because rates of radiative forcing peaked nearly thirty years ago:

Of course, the OECD (US, Europe, Australia, Japan ) emissions have been declining for almost a decade now. It’s not surprising that as developing nations advance, that they adopt developed technology and efficiency:

And as noted, aging populations mean the fixed incomes of retirement and reduced consumption.

Even a constant rate of increase in CO2 means a slowing of forcing and lower rates of warming.

Not very much lower, though. You’re only talking about a delay of a few years.

Excess biomass formation is only a small and temporary fraction of the removal process. And if CO2 were to start dropping, that excess biomass would decay and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. In fact, only a small fraction, less than 13% of the emissions for the previous year are removed from the atmosphere in one year, not 60%. The rest represents removal of previous years’ emissions. It takes ~30 years for 50% removal and it slows down from there. After 200 years, ~25% is still in the atmosphere. On the order of 15% will take hundreds of thousands or more to be removed by the geologic carbon cycle, which dominates on the scale of millions of years.

If you want to play with a carbon cycle model that includes the geologic cycle to see how it’s supposed to work, Archer has one that runs on Firefox, Chrome and Safari as well as a lot of other interesting models like MODTRAN. http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/geocarb/

Discussing the rates of removal may be a bit difficult to understand. Why does only a part of the removal relate to the latest CO2 releases?

Looking in another way that becomes clear. Some reservoirs, most notably surface ocean and some parts of the biosphere interact strongly with the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 in these reservoirs reaches an equilibrium with the atmosphere rapidly, in one year or so. The effective capacity of these reservoirs is roughly 15% of that of the atmosphere. That’s the origin of this share. Other reservoirs are larger, but take longer to reach balance, and some (geologic) are virtually unlimited, but the rate of removal to these reservoirs is very slow.

Note that this looks like a four box approximation to the real model and is probably only good for times less than 1,000 years. For longer periods, you’d probably have to add boxes with time constants on the order of 2,000, 20,000, 200,000… years and reduce the magnitude of ao.

I hope the image of the equation displays. I could try LaTex, but I’m not very good at it. If it doesn’t, it’s the sum of the constant term plus three exponential decay terms multiplied by the respective constants and with the respective time constants listed.

1.) The psychology of denial is stunningly similar. (I’m German. While my grandpa (R.I.P.) was innocent, he had less innocent beer buddies, ex Waffen SS guys. I’ve had my share of Auschwitz debate with them. Sometimes I felt sorry for them and their psycho-logical self torturing. Very Serious Old People making totally ridicu-lousy clowns out of themselves. May the roast in hell…)

2.) The effects of climate change may very well dwarf the Auschwitz death toll 10-fold. Maybe even a billion. We’ll see later this century. (Just look at Syria today, the paradigm of things to come, where overpopulation met agricultural collapse due to a climatic glitch, pushing 1m poor farmers over the cliff. Have a look at the madness of ISIS, or Boko Haram, etc. etc. Darfur anybody? Etc. etc. The madness will grow as things worsen. Homo “Sapiens” won’t starve peacefully.)

3.) The very first shoah deniers were Jewish Germans: They couldn’t believe it coming. Same thing today with climate (plus overpopulation plus resource depletion, etc.) Roundness of planet (hence finitude) is not yet generally accepted in politics and finance and will continue to be denied by many Very Important Persons.

Those people who knowingly try and prevent action on climate change in full knowledge that probably up to 1 billion people will die as a direct result should also be called ‘d..rs’.

That is almost certainly just about everyone not in 100% agreement with the latest IPCC report (detail alert – that is, in full agreement with the ‘executive summary’ – not the content which might be less certain).

No one can be confused – as I’ve shown in the article. That’s not possible.

No one can have any doubt about the 1BN people dying as a direct result.

Well, we can (and alas will) debate endlessly if it will be 1bn really. Or less. Maybe just 500m? (A favorite argument of one of the old Nazi guys: “Auschwitz was just 1m dead! Look at all the survivors everywhere!”) Or that Homo Sapiens can change his mind. And that there will be compassion and reason when the SHTF.

I’m not debating how many people are going to die as a direct result of the coming Armageddon. I’m taking it as read that you are correct.

In fact this whole article was written to demonstrate that it is slightly more difficult (‘slightly’ is satire..). Start again with zero satire..

In fact this whole article was written to demonstrate that it is much more difficult to understand the evidence for anthrogenic global warming than it is to understand the evidence for the Holocaust.

Of course, many people claim otherwise, as shown in the link I found on Keith Klor’s article. I don’t think they understand how complex the subject is – in fact, the claim that it is an easy subject and no one could be confused is a claim mostly taken on faith.

Unless, and here is the caveat on that specific point, unless the people claiming it are themselves seriously involved in the field of atmospheric and ocean physics and understand climate modeling to a high level, their claim is simply a claim taken on faith of what other people have told them. In my quick scan of that list of people, they are all people who have taken it on faith from other people.

And to clarify what I am saying a little further, that’s not the belief that AGW is real and a real threat – it’s perfectly reasonable to take expert opinion when you don’t have the time, expertise and passion to research it yourself. No it’s the belief that no one could be confused. And therefore, the parroted claim goes, because no one could be confused, therefore it is wilful denial. And so we will label them appropriately.

No one has demonstrated a proof of AGW being simple. The fact that it is often presented simplistically doesn’t mean the simplistic proof is in any way defensible.

And so we move onto the problem.

Some people naturally don’t take stuff on faith.

I was even taught to check ideas and evidence for myself. No doubt these scientists and academics who promoted independent thought and scientific skepticism should also be subject to the same punishment as regular ‘d..rs’ for encouraging possibly heresy.

I suggest you put forward the simple demonstration and I will put forward, as Devil’s advocate, the questions you need to answer to actually proof your point.

I’ll give you an example. Some people read about the greenhouse effect and then have people suggest it is saturated – more CO2 cannot increase the greenhouse effect because CO2 is already ‘maxed out’.

Actually explaining this, proving this is hard. I think I have done that on this blog. But it isn’t simple. When I first started trying to understand atmospheric physics and atmospheric radiation it took me some time to understand it and get to the bottom of it.

Also, even if an academic researcher, a physics professor who fully grasps the subject claims it is *easy* they still have work to do.

My experience of university lecturers was they were very bad at teaching because they never recognised how difficult the subject was, whether a naturally difficult subject like quantum mechanics or an ‘easy’ subject like heat transfer.

A few students seemed to grasp new ideas and how to implement them quickly – they stayed in academia. Most of us struggled.

So, show us the simple proof that everyone can grasp that CO2 is not ‘saturated’, and for part 2, because the first one is simple by comparison, demonstrate that Miskolczi was wrong in his claim that water vapor changes cancel out increases in the greenhouse effect (and therefore there is no coming Armaggedon)

And you can’t use any material from this blog because that would be cheating.

And just to be completely clear, I am not in doubt on these points. I am claiming, and demonstrating, that the subject is difficult and not at all like weighing up witness statements and photographs.

Not a single person in the 250 comments so far appears to have made the slightest effort to demonstrate anything to the contrary. Perhaps that is because it is not possible.

Yes, climate science is hard. But hardness is relative. (Like, QM can be easy if you love Hilbert space math. Like, the burden of complexity being distributed over many shoulders of giants.) The rough picture is known since Arrhenius (if not Fourier and Tyndall) (modulo some ocean chemistry). The rest is observation and well-grounded (not ego-disturbed) intuition. Some caring and love of reality required beyond your wallet. Incl. observing scientists (E.g. observing string theorist Lubos M tripping over the CO2 saturation thing…)

P.S.: hmmm
P.P.S.: I hesitate going further, for this all is deeply unsettling for most. (Plus I should get sleep). But. Even the Holocaust evidence is “hard”. Body count from photographs? What if those gas chambers were for desinfection? Zyklon B required 300ppm to kill insects, but 30000ppm to kill humans! I heard the crematory at Dachau was a U.S. Army installation… Anyhow, the proportions of cruelty weighted with numbers: The Croatian Holocaust even made their Nazi peers throw up (hand crafted, not nice clean gas chambers…). And didn’t Stalin kill more? (Like, wasn’t there climate change before?) wrrr… Apropos, I seriously recommend looking at the Croatian Holocaust (or maybe Pol Pot) as a mental preparation for thinking through the prospects of the coming century. The hard stuff begins when multiplying the several converging catastrophes with “human nature” (which I contend is not a well-defined concept). Alas we need to look into this abyss (looking away would be criminal neglect) so we might find a way to bridge it. Or descend decently… (Methinks Heidegger gave a good hint to think-through around 1937: “Why is the Earth silent at this destruction?” – Beiträge §155)

The question of whether the earth circles the sun is not a scientific question, it is a linguistic one as you will realise if you think about it for more than a minute.

Similarly the d..nier one has nothing to do with the ease or otherwise of dealing with historic information or the climate scientifically. It too is a linguistic one. And I suspect it is likely much more narrow, simply being an issue relating to the English language.

I wonder what insults they use in Chinese for dealing with the other side in climate debates? Perhaps they make veiled comparisons to the perpetrators of the Nanking Massacre.

I hesitate going further, for this all is deeply unsettling for most … Even the Holocaust evidence is “hard” …

No it’s not. Some people are not prepared to accept incredibly strong, easy to understand historical evidence of horrific reality. What makes it “hard” for them is a flaw morally – or perhaps, most charitably, in the people they’ve had the misfortune to be influenced by. (And in the end that too is not a misfortune but a choice.) I’m talking about the ordinary person here, the “man on the Clapham omnibus” as English law used to say.

What makes it hard for me to believe the new paper in Nature by Jochem Marotzke and Piers Forster is any use in explaining discrepancies between GCMs and reality is a different thing. But do deployers of the D-word ever make any distinction to exclude Nic Lewis and his publisher Steve McIntyre from its baleful scope? In all my disgusted reading, never. Counter-examples very welcome indeed.

Or, as SoD says, take CO2 saturation. I agree with him and with you on what’s true. But I agree with him, not you, that it’s hard to explain, even for someone with some background in physics. For the ordinary person getting on with their life it’s bafflingly hard. Which the Holocaust isn’t.

But that’s also, I’m sure, not a problem for you. You simply have to explain the CO2 saturation situation in terms any 12-year-old could understand.

Richard, so here’s my explanation of the saturation thing for the interested 12y old:

1.) Paleoclimatic evidence shows there is no saturation. (So why are d*ers even discussing is?) And there is actually no need to understand such detail (just as you dont need to learn Jiddish and German to understand the Holocaust.) But of course it’s interesting and real physicists (not me) care about it.
2.) Angström’s experiment that showed saturation does not represent the structure of the atmosphere. He jumped to a conclusion that has long been disproven by other scientists.
3.) There’s radiative balance, otherwise the Earth would long have boiled over. Heat radiation escapes to outer space at the high layer of the atmosphere. 3a) Even if there were saturation at lower layers, somewhere this has to stop to keep the balance. So, an effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere is that heat has to travel further up (getting absorbed and thrown around by the GHG until it reaches the top on this erratic way) – but at the end a proportion necessary to keep the heat balance is emitted into space and goes away. 3b) Anyhow measurements show that there is no absorption even in the lower layers of our atmosphere.

“(…) So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the “saturation argument” against global warming, here’s all you need to say: (a) You’d still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it’s the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It’s not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn’t overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there’s little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models. (…)”

————————–
The the new paper in Nature by Jochem Marotzke and Piers Forster I refuse to discuss when referenced via a known antiscientific blog.

P.S.1.: Actually I find the saturation counter point harder to grasp than the real thing. Maybe because I’m stupid or lazy. Maybe because the d*ers are psychpathologically grasping at any straws.

P.S.2.: Yes I seriously contend that the Holocaust is hard to grasp for some. Not only for Nazis old and young. I recall my share of debate with a very learned theologian (a clericofashistoid type, now killed by alcohol, R.I.P).

And of course I get it. But to get it you have to open your mind just like with any nontrivial reality: Not only probe the details (and the detail arguments). You need to try to get hold of as much as possible of the whole web of things – which requires a differend kind of pondering and looking than just accounting the machination of details. This second kind of minding can make the whole edifice of climate science easier and rewardingly beautiful to behold.

What we do believe ourselves, and what we can expect others to accept are two different things.

It should be clear that very few can personally judge the science. That applies as much, or perhaps even more to the paleoclimatic evidence that is highly dependent on accepting the narratives and in many ways indirect evidence that the most important part of paleoclimatic is using.

When most people can base their beliefs only on what others are telling, the next question is, how they can decide whom to believe. Again they are not capable of judging the merits of of the various sources. They have sources that they trust more and these sources have their sources. There are typically more than two intermediary steps between the original sources of knowledge and typical lay audience.

People do intuitively understand that the message may get distorted by this multilevel process. That’s one reason for the reality that other factors than thoughts about the physical reality affect strongly the policy views and the policy views affect what people say about the physical reality, whether people have any trust in their knowledge on that or not.

I do think there are other ways in which we can inform a judgement about complex issues without going into the detail. That is to ask “does it pass the sniff test – does it makes sense?”

As societies we use that kind of thing extensively in judging disputes and the like. My professional life is spent assessing the value of top end physics and engineering across a wide range of disciplines, and you do it by insisting on getting a relatively plain language description of the claims (and a bit of well placed due diligence using a background in those foundation disciplines maths and formal logic helps).

The other things we do is as a society is make judgements about the system that is producing the claims. We look for the QA, the existence of independent/disinterested auditors/arbiters so Judicial determinations out of non-corrupt countries are more likely to be accepted/trusted that those where bribery and nepotism holds sway.

Turning to climate science I think the central issue is around the latter problem. It has become political and a section of the scientific community activists. It therefore pays for the public to take the science, particularly that which is advocacy related, with a grain of salt. Just like our tendency not to trust the shiny suit who has “a deal for you”. If we don’t trust the systems that generated it and the motives of those involved, it makes good sense not to naively trust the outputs.

And finally this brings us to Florifulgurator. He/she believes in the system, including the system that sits in that political world beyond the science.

For all the above reasons I’d be sceptical of any assertion that came from that quarter without good prima facie evidence to back it up.

HAS,
There are different ways people who are willing to make an effort can assess the the reliability of the information they get. You are discussing a situation, where you are doing that professionally. It’s also likely that you do that with information that’s not totally unfamiliar to you and that you use sources of information you have specific knowledge about.

What I was discussing is not such a case. Very many people have some interest in the climate issue without any of the strengths you have in your professional life.

I meant my comment to be less about my circumstances, but more about the second point: the lack of trust in the systems that might otherwise give confidence to the general public in what climate science was saying.

I guess I’m more interested in the easier proof of the assertion that AGW “may very well” = 60M or “maybe” 1B deaths. Since it is science I’m interested in the actual estimated probabilities and manner of death here. I guess I have more faith in humanity’s ability to adapt than others.

I’m also interested in how one can accept “climate change” caused the situation in Syria. The assertion that “climate” was a material factor in this civil war is a stretch, the assertion that “climate change” is a material factor in light of little evidence of changes in global drought trends is even more of a stretch.

I suppose one can dream up triggering events and then blame every single death on the fact that it didn’t rain last Tuesday. A butterfly flaps it’s wings….but I’m not very inclined to believe that without compelling evidence it isn’t simply because the two groups hate each other and it is a struggle for political control. Paleo of past wars seem to support a theory of a political struggle being a dominant cause of past wars. I guess that is part of my d….l.

The last time I looked radical Islamists have an agenda entirely unconnected to climate change.

I’m sure once F’urator’s convinced us of the simplicity and completeness of his explanation of CO2 saturation for the person in the street, compelling proof of climate change’s central role in the atrocities in Syria will be right behind.

Yes, but when dismissing the saturation argument, these “real experts” don’t tell you in this article that doubling CO2 will produce only 1 degC of warming through changes in absorption and emission of OLR. They also don’t tell you that Angstrom’s conclusion – that the effect of doubling CO2 was negligible, was more accurate than Arrhenius’s conclusion that warming would be 5 degC (before feedbacks).

I read RealClimate briefly, until they told me that Al Gore’s confusing correlation with causation in An Inconvenient Truth was a trivial mistake. Since they were also expressing their disdain for a guy named McIntyre, I decided to see what he had to say. McIntyre recommended ScienceofDoom. Neither blog is listed at RealClimate. Nor will you find Climate Dialogue, which features online debates from scientists with a range of opinions. Only true believers in the cause are allowed at RealClimate. Don’t send your bright 12-year old to get a one-sided presentation from experts with an axe to grind. Remember your Steven Schneider: Making the world a better place may require scientists to get lots of publicity by telling scary stories, making simplified dramatic statements, and hiding doubts.

Well said. But nowhere has it said the 12-year-old has to be bright. She wouldn’t need to be to understand the evidence for the Holocaust. And it’s the claim of such equivalence that is the subject here.

‘If as suggested here, a dynamically driven climate shift has occurred, the duration of similar shifts during the 20th century suggests the new global mean temperature trend may persist for several decades. Of course, it is purely speculative to presume that the global mean temperature will remain near current levels for such an extended period of time. Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing. However, the nature of these past shifts in climate state suggests the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into the future must at least be entertained. The apparent lack of a proximate cause behind the halt in warming post 2001/02 challenges our understanding of the climate system, specifically the physical reasoning and causal links between longer time-scale modes of internal climate variability and the impact of such modes upon global temperature. Fortunately, climate science is rapidly developing the tools to meet this challenge, as in the near future it will be possible to attribute cause and effect in decadal-scale climate variability within the context of a seamless climate forecast system [Palmer et al., 2008]. Doing so is vital, as the future evolution of the global mean temperature may hold surprises on both the warm and cold ends of the spectrum due entirely to internal variability that lie well outside the envelope of a steadily increasing global mean temperature.’http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL037022/full

Most people are still working with an inadequate climate paradigm. Complexity science has immense explanatory power for climate data.
Ultimately valid approaches to climate science depend on data – ocean heat, TSI and emitted power flux – and on new approaches to network math using data on the Earth system. It is science but well over the heads of most people. Including obviously just about everyone here.

At this stage climate is beyond prediction and narratives about ‘den_ers’ killing a billion people – many more than the Holocaust – this century are empty ideological twaddle.

Effective policy responses are broad ranging involving the full range of greenhouse gases, black carbon and aerosols. Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels are some 33% of the forcing equation – that from electricity generation even less. And there is no solution there but cost competitive energy sources.

What we have is not an excess of ‘den_iers’ but a plethora of ‘id_ots’ who can’t even get the emissions equation right let alone the science of climate.

Can we build alternative – low cost and low carbon – energy sources? Something like the GA energy multiplier is easily technically feasible – and solves all of the problematical features of conventional nuclear including waste. You’d distribute in a regional network. Perfect for places that don’t currently have a distribution system.

But it still solves the smaller part of the emissions problem. The rest requites social and economic development policies that build on health, education, environmental conservation and agricultural development. The way of the future is to build a prosperous and resilient global civilisation worthy of the name this century.

We begin locally with environment conservation and restoration – including of agricultural soils necessarily – and building resilience to building resilience to extreme weather whatever the cause – are we have not seen anywhere near the extremes climate is capable of in the last century. International development policy is at a critical juncture.

In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals set a few, highly effective targets for the world, e.g. halve the proportion of poor and hungry and reduce childhood mortality by two-thirds. The goals have been a huge success. Now, the UN and the world is to decide which new goals will take over in 2015.

The UN s Open Working Group has proposed 169 targets. But we need to know which are most effective. Copenhagen Consensus has asked 30+ of the world’s top economists to highlight phenomenal, good, fair and poor targets, weighing up the social, environmental and economic benefits and costs.
The world will spend $2.5 trillion in development aid from 2015-2030, and these goals will influence a large part of that spending. Making just one target better can do hundreds of billions of dollars worth of good.

How moral is it to spend money subsidizing solar and wind power in the developed world to no real current effect and questionable future effect on CO2 emissions, much less climate, when there are billions of people now that lack clean water and die prematurely as a result. Solar and wind power, intermittent as it is, makes much more sense being deployed where there isn’t any electricity at all.

But no. Better to put it on your roof and rip off the taxpayers with any government subsidy for the capital investment and the other rate payers by selling excess power back to the grid at retail while feeling good about yourself as having done something about global warming. /sarc

Remove the subsidies for purchase and stop forcing utilities to buy excess power at retail and see how fast it grows. And it’s still intermittent, which means that it can never be more than half of total electric generation capacity and probably more like 30%. Most states limit the amount of electricity from roof top solar panels that utilities are required to buy.

DeWitt: While you are ranting, don’t forget the affluent citizens who install subsidized solar power are also asking their less affluent neighbors to pay for the distribution network needed to provide electricity to the owner of solar panels whenever he asks for it (including times of peak demand) – in addition to paying for subsidies and excess electricity returned to the grid.

The negative externalities associated with generating electricity from roof-top solar are probably greater that the negative externalities associated with fossil fuel, i.e. the social cost of carbon dioxide.

Now that the n-word has been used on this blog, are there any plans to prohibit it? I think there is universal agreement that the n-word is a racist slur, whereas only certain people are even claiming that the d-word is impolite.

I used it because I’d done so on Twitter last Sunday, shocking one UK climate scientist who later said he wouldn’t use the D-word again. I hadn’t done such a thing before – on Twitter that is. I thought it was a pretty interesting story. I made sure in the post here, by spelling our d****r in full, that the host would have a chance to read what I’d written before it was made known to the world. He chose to publish. I think from that you we know what his policy is, in this particular context, which is unique for this blog.

But while you’re on the line, so to speak, you didn’t answer my question earlier:

Can I clarify please that if the comparison with Holocaust d****r is explicit, or confirmed by the speaker, you profoundly disagree with it?

I have asked this of different people on this thread defending use of the D-word. For some very strange reason none of them have answered. Nobody’s playing games with this incredibly serious subject, are they?

If the silence goes on much longer all that users of the D-word are going to have left is implausible deniability. They do mean the term in exactly the way SoD takes it. They just don’t have the courage to say it.

The long silence you perceive is due to the fact that reading and replying to comments is not my priority. I have a life. Checking once a day is more than enough for me. I consider blog comments to be a waste of time and almost never read them, let alone write them.

That said, other people’s comparisons have absolutely no bearing on how I use a word. Your question is ambiguous and irrelevant.

I have no idea whether you are asking me to defend someone who might have said, “All global warming deniers are Nazis” or whether it was “Global warming deniers use some of the same methods as Holocaust deniers.” The former is certainly false, and the latter is certainly true (it is true in the same sense that the American sniper used some of the same techniques as Nazi snipers… they both shot guns). True, but irrelevant to motivations or morality. Your obsession with Holocaust denial says more about you than it does about me.

What I find absolutely despicable is your attempt to create a false equivalence between “d*nier” and “n*gger.” To accompany that claim with a video showing a man being attacked for using the word, with the narration, “What usually happens to crazy people who say things like this” is clearly an attempt to justify violence against those of us who use the word “d*nier.”

Veiled threats are conversation stoppers. That and your apparent delight at shocking people with your repeated and uncensored use of the truly offensive n-word has stopped this conversation. Any blogger with decency would ban the n-word and block anybody who uses it. I won’t read a blog in which the word “N*gger” is used so inappropriately, and I won’t be visiting this one again for that reason.

Methinks I had the “courage”. If you think being reality-oriented needs courage. Me, I’m just too lazy to waste energy on ego psycho things. Courageously lazy, perhaps… — We don’t have the time for this anymore, c21st. There’s a reality outside the hollow world of our heads which calls for attention. We can no longer afford cowards.

The way I’d put it is that you’re doing their dirty work for them. They don’t have the courage and you don’t have the decency or moral fibre to recognise how extraordinarily inappropriate the claimed equivalence is. But yes, at least you are open about your view. Small mercies indeed.

[…] the term ‘denier’ as used by advocates of the Consensus position about their opponents. Science of Doom started the ball rolling, after which it got Keith Kloor to write a post on his Discovery Blog. After which HotWhopper wrote […]

Earlier on, I was asked if I had ever been called a ‘d..r’ and I said not to my knowledge. Finding that I have just been reminds me that I’m sure I was in the past quite some time ago but where I can’t remember.

I love the comments (and for other reasons, the claim that I used to work at GFDL in NOAA.. where I have never worked).

Basically, if you are against “people not in 100% accord with consensus climate science” being called “d..rs” –

Or – if you question something that isn’t questioned in a published paper.

You probably are one.

And if you look at the various (contemporary) discussions in links given by me and others in the comments to this article, you will find that very many people are either

a) in favor of it, because anyone who.[fill in the blanks].. is a ‘d..r’ and we should tell them

b) not really a fan of using the term, but basically the only people complaining are those with some kind of victim complex and do we really want to take them seriously?

Such is the climate debate.

In the highly-charged, highly-polarized media and blog debate the subject is reduced to the reader working out first which “side” you are on from the clues you give, and then it’s easy to work out how to deal with you.

Name calling and hyperbolic rhetoric on both sides is common. Just recently, a prominent climate scientist called her opponents “the equivalent of racists and anti-semites” whilst insisting that it is legitimate to compare the “tyranny” “sceptics” are subject to to the mass murder at Charlie Hebdo.

James Hansen I think has referred to trains transporting coal to power stations as “death trains”.

I’m sadly sure many worse examples could be rapidly summoned up with the magic of google.

I think everyone here would agree that labelling your blog as “denialist” would be risible. I think most people here agree that calling people “deniers” is not a great idea for various reasons.

But still, not everyone here clearly agrees as to whether using that word is quite so reprehensible as your original post suggests. It could be reasonably said that stating

those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people.

is not really helping the debate but rather adding to the “highly polarized” atmosphere you bemoan.

Your blog is a very rare, perhaps unique example of genuine scepticism in this debate and actually helps show how unsceptical many “sceptics” are; in that way it makes a good contribution to reducing the level of polarization.

It could be reasonably said that stating “those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people” is not really helping the debate but rather adding to the “highly polarized” atmosphere you bemoan.

This can only be reasonably said if

a) it’s reasonable to trust users of the D-word that they don’t intend any reference to or allusion to Holocaust D****r

b) speaker intention controls the meaning, both for referents of d****r and third-parties.

As Mosher has said the second point simply isn’t the case. So what you say can’t be reasonably said.

In addition, in seeking to tease out the precise details of speaker intentionality, from my second contribution here, five days ago, I’ve noted

the dearth of examples of people like yourself calling out those in your own camp who have made the analogy absolutely explicit.

I’ve challenged anyone supporting use of the D-word to make clear their abhorrence at the explicit comparison. Nobody has got close to doing so. And yet you are willing to trust these speakers about the purity of their intentions?

It’s the D-word that has caused polarisation. Once its use became de rigeur for many intimately involved in the climate debate, including Trenberth, Mann and many beyond, those of us in the invidious position of being its referents had a choice. Stay silent and ‘suck it up’ or resist. I was guided by a thought that Shub Niggurath articulated well on Bishop Hill a year ago:

That’s exactly what the abusers want – to abuse, and your own license to abuse.

All manner of reasonable complaints were ignored so sometimes we use ‘shock tactics’ to show just how abusive we feel the comparison with Nazi apologists is. This in not dishonest. The D-word is every bit as bad as the N-word if you face up to how deeply inappropriate the comparison is.

Whether you take offense at the semantic connotations or not, indiscriminate use of the label is clearly an argumentum ad hominem. It’s meant to poison the well: XYZ is a CCD, so you don’t need to pay any attention to him.

OTOH, calling SoD a CCD is well on the way to making the label apply so broadly as to be meaningless as the set of all non-CCD’s starts to become vanishingly small.

Ya – when the discourse reaches that level, I back away with a smugness – “Is ad hom all you got?”.

But the larger point – denial – rather than calling someone a ‘denier’ persists.

Denial is an aspect of confirmation bias – emphasize the confirmatory evidence and disregard, ignore, de-emphasize the contradictory.

Thing is, EVERYONE is suceptible to confirmation bias, so denial comes from denying that observed trends are all less than modeled just as much as denying that observed trends are all greater than zero.

There is an interesting article by Mischa Tomkiewicz, professor of physics at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He was also a Holocaust survivor. He equates the term “climate change den*er with those who d*ny the Holocaust:

” ….reflects the unden*able fact that the term “den*ers” has a direct association specifically with Holocaust den*ers and captures much of the intellectual spirit and tone of this debate.”

He also thinks the comparison is fair, since according to him, climate change will result in a future holocaust far greater in number than the Holocaust of the 1940’s. Go figure.

Personally, I would rather be called the F word than the D word. The F word just rolls of my back. The D word riles me up. So use the term “Climate Change F**kers”, since we are allegedly F-ing up the climate. Makes perfect sense.

Surviving the Holocaust doesn’t automatically confer sainthood or wisdom. SoD’s arguments about the extreme difference in nature of the evidence for the two events, one real and horrific in the past and the other future and imagined, based not just on hard-for-a-12-year-old-to-understand atmospheric physics but pessimistic assumptions about humankind’s future resourcefulness in finding ways to adapt to changes in climate, and much else on which it’s perfectly possible for reasonable people to differ, are conclusive. Every reader of this thread should have agreed the explicit comparison is abhorrent, even if they wanted to quibble over their use of their precious D-word.

For some reason, I am unable to post a quantitative discussion of the prevalence of the word “d….l” in recent media. Suffice it to say that, if you search the New York Times for the word, you’ll see that it’s used in a wide variety of contexts, including most recently in the headline of an article about vaccines.

These data clearly undermine the idea that use of the d words implies intent to demean the suffering of Holocaust victims.

We’re not saying “The Spurs keeper brilliantly denied Ozil in the last minute” alludes to Holocaust. I’m living in hope for big match in London tomorrow! Not all phrases with morpheme ‘den’ in them are racist calumny. Problem arises because of many explicit comparisons your side made from 2007

In addition to this good news I’m delighted to say Spurs did win against Arsenal the next day, despite an early goal from Ozil. On why the morpheme ‘den’ isn’t enough to prove the point either way see five days ago and elsewhere on this thread.

Despite DeWitt Payne calling an end to hostilities I’d like to suggest two real ‘basics’ as a framework for future discussion.

Assert p Deny !p

Any time you assert a proposition, in any area, you are denying its opposite. Such pervasive use (or potential use) of ‘deny’ and its many cognates has got nothing to do with the debate here, which is triggered by

1. explicit comparisons with Holocaust den***
2. the form “[abstract climate-related noun] den***”
3. den*** as a convenient shortened form for the second.

specifically in the context of the climate debate.

Past murder, possible future disaster

The mass-murder of the Jews in the Holocaust is certain – though the precise numbers aren’t, for example through the wonderful work of the Catholic priest Patrick Desbois.

A imagined future disaster in which billions suffer untimely death isn’t certain and isn’t murder. Even if you take the extinction of the human race as the ‘cost of inaction’, as someone from Deutsche Bank notoriously did in December 2009 this is still true. For nobody can tell you today exactly what policies will guarantee avoiding such disaster. Imagine only two females surviving in such a future, unable to perpetuate the race. They might discuss what caused the problem. They still wouldn’t know. That meteor strike seemed to have something to do with it. That nuclear exchange. That massive volcanic eruption. (It was a bad year or two.) Neither woman could know for sure.

Some of the deaths may legitimately be considered mass-murder, like Stalin’s terror-famine in the Ukraine or Mao’s version of the same thing. But the links between our greenhouse gas emissions and the bad stuff will still be elusive then. And thus the analogy falls apart now.

To be properly human is to remember rightly. I cannot praise SoD highly enough for his contribution to the darkest part of the climate debate, on behalf of properly remembering.

Sophisticated readers know a science d….r when they see one: the libertarian irresponsibly attacking vaccine safety, the oil-state senator mocking climate theory, the southern Bible-thumper denying the fossil in front of his nose.

But the biggest gap between public opinion and scientific consensus in the United States is not in the realm of vaccines, global warming or evolution but regarding the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods. And the science d….rs on this topic are more likely to be Democratic than Republican, with college-educated Americans almost evenly split….

The Ebola virus has multiplied in a medium of d….l. There was the initial d….l that a rural disease, causing isolated outbreaks that burned out quickly, could become a sustained, urban killer. There is the (understandable) d….l of patients in West Africa, who convince themselves that they have flu or malaria (the symptoms are similar to Ebola) and remain in communities. And there is the form of d….l now practiced by Western governments — a misguided belief that an incremental response can get ahead of an exponentially growing threat….

State of D….l: Bush at War, Part III (ISBN 0-7432-7223-4) is a book by Bob Woodward, originally due to be published October 2, 2006 (but unexpectedly released two days early by the publisher due to demand), that examines how the George W. Bush administration managed the Iraq War after the 2003 invasion.

House Republican leader John Boehner criticized President Obama on Thursday, saying that the president and other Democrats are in “d….l” about Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which scores of Democrats were ousted from Congress as Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives.

In an interview with ABC’s “World News,” the Speaker-in-waiting said he believes “there seems to be some d….l on the part of the president and other Democratic leaders of the message that was sent by the American people.”

Pekka: Absolutely right. The misdirection bug – ignoring the real complaint and question and pretending your critics are saying something they are not. The upshot in this case being they couldn’t give a damn about the victims of the Holocaust. And that’s serious.

So the Language Police seem to be saying that it’s OK to use “d” words in every sense but the ones pertaining to certain views on climate issues.

I get it.

The point of the objection is to derail the climate debate by defaming people who use those terms as horrid pigs who “couldn’t give a damn about victims of the Holocaust”. That rhetoric is, of course, calibrated to register just a femtometer short of the Godwin line, but I think that pressure broadening from repeated vociferous invocation has pushed it clear over the edge.

Meow and vtg: Nobody trying to justify use of the D-word has admitted that deliberate comparison of climate doubt with Holocaust D****l is abhorrent. To not admit that is to not give a damn about the original victims of one of the worst atrocities in history. SoD spelled this out very effectively in the original post. You don’t care. This has profoundly negative implications for the climate debate. However, some have vowed to eschew the term in the last week. That’s why these debates – and plain speaking within them – matter so much.

1. False and defamatory accusations of N..i sympathies;
2. Repetitive concern trolling — since you’ve already made this personal, what have you done to fight the many and virulently hateful neo-N..i movements of the modern world?
3. Sneaky attempts to confound d….l of a significant anthropogenic role in deleterious climate change with “doubt”;
4. Underlying rhetorical attempt to put those pushing for action to prevent deleterious anthropogenic climate change on the defensive for a made-up offense that is completely unrelated to climate issues.

That said, I think that explicit comparison of climate d….l with Holocaust d….l is quite overdrawn — at present. I am not sure whether it will be overdrawn after another few decades of BAU. I hope that we are wise enough to avoid finding out.

As for any other use of phrases like “climate d….l”, there is no more relation to The Holocaust than for any other use of the “d….l”, in other words, none. If you’ve got to resort to Language Police tactics, you’re likely to already have lost the underlying argument.

You’ve noted some things that aren’t there but I consider you the first apologist for “climate d****r” who has considered the key question I’ve raised and given an imperfect but honest answer. Something on which we can build.

I’m busy most of Tuesday but will respond in more detail by tomorrow. Others can I’m sure take the strain in the meantime.

People using “carefully considered descriptions of others who are not 100% in accord with consensus climate science” (for example, the term ‘d..rs’) have won the “underlying argument”.

Those who suggest that others using “carefully weighted descriptions of others who are not 100% in accord with consensus climate science” are making a mistake – well, those people are resorting to “Language Police” tactics, and you are correct “they are likely to already have lost the underlying argument.”

I didn’t sense any confusion, because, although I’m sure our views aren’t identical on all subjects, I’m with SoD on the main theme of this thread.

Meanwhile, I was hoping to pick up the train of thought with you, Meow, but, instead, there are now a number of others angrily justifying their use of the D-word, although it seems on two quite different bases:

1. It does imply equivalence with modern-day apologists for the regime that carried out the Holocaust – or worse – and quite right too

2. By golly it doesn’t and how ridiculous of any of us to think so.

I would say “make your minds up” but I don’t really think it is a matter of that. It’s worse, as I explained on Bishop Hill last March.

What a weird, disappointing, ultimately sad and counterproductive post SoD.

– – –
Denial is a word for “: a statement saying that something is not true or real –
psychology : a condition in which someone will not admit that something sad, painful, etc., is true or real
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“… to use the terms “climate changer deniers” and “climate change denial” (where “denial” encompasses unwarranted doubt as well as outright rejection). The terms are intended descriptively, not in any pejorative sense, and are used for the sake of brevity and consistency with a well-established usage in the scholarly and journalistic literature.”

http://ncse.com/climate/denial/why-is-it-called-denial
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SoD you wrote: “If you have no soul and no empathy for the suffering of millions under the Third Reich, keep calling people who don’t accept consensus climate science ‘deniers’.
Otherwise, just stop.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please SoD I wish you would JUST STOP – and consider the ramifications of what we are doing to our planet – that ruthless destruction brought on by mindless behavior will far out weigh the horrors of Nazi Germany, horrendous as they were.

I would have thought you of all people would recognize the horrors we are forcing into our children’s future!

I’m sorry but you’re “trivializing” card belongs to the other side.
What about empathy for this planet’s biosphere and our children’s future and the destruction we have preordained???

that ruthless destruction brought on by mindless behavior will far out weigh the horrors of Nazi Germany, horrendous as they were.

What about empathy for this planet’s biosphere and our children’s future and the destruction we have preordained???

Almost as good as SoD’s original post, unless you’re actually serious.

On the off chance you are, your evidence for this is what? Hyperbolic Chicken Little rhetoric is counterproductive. Most people ignore it like they ignored the guys who used to walk the street wearing sandwich boards proclaiming the end is nigh. Or the British Science Minister, Professor Sir David King, who said in 2004 that Antarctica would be the only habitable continent by 2100.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not minimizing the NAZI horrors and probably have a deeper appreciate for the monstrosity than most that didn’t actually live through it — still what we are doing to our biosphere and ALL the people and other living beings that dependent on this life support system that took billions and millions of years to evolve to it’s current state of dynamic balance, will be more hideous.
Besides looking at some of the suffering our ‘blind western insatiable greed’ has already inflicted upon nations and people we so easily ignore… – and we think we are so much better than the NAZI’s and the “good German people” who lost their way… don’t flatter yourself.

I have a question about another family of usages that would seem, by the standards of this post, to fall into the same category as the “d” words. The terms are “climate N..i”, “global warming N..i”, etc. I notice, for example, that Dr. Spencer used the latter — and then went on to make direct comparisons between N..is and those urging action to reduce CO2 emissions.

Is that just as reprehensible as the use of the “d” words, in the view of those who condemn the latter? If so, why has no one condemned it?

You know SoD, I’ll admit, first time I read through your post – I got all caught up with the comments. Since then RD got me to revisit Weinstein’s cartoon comments, this got me to reread your original article. Seems my first read-through was superficial and I think biased by my high regard for you, (earned by some of your fine posts regarding the physics of greenhouse gases). I now appreciate that in my focus on comments, I overlooked much in your words that’s worth taking issue with. So now I have a few questions for you, if you’ll stand for them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SoD writes: “Everyone knows what this (Denier) word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.”
– – –
Who says? By what right? Unidirectional skepticism equals denial – period. Whether it’s about a historic atrocity or lying about the critically important lessons climate scientists have to teach us.

The Holocaust doesn’t own the “D” word, nor does it have a corner on the dreadful sin of denial in the face of overwhelming evidence! What’s repulsive is the Republican/libertarian machine highjacking the Holocaust to fabricate yet another counter-productive attack on climate science.

Why you’ve chosen to play into it is beyond me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SoD writes: “By comparison, understanding climate means understanding maths, physics and statistics. This is hard, very hard. It’s time consuming, requires some training (although people can be self-taught), actually requires academic access to be able to follow the thread of an argument through papers over a few decades – and lots and lots of dedication.”
– – –
NO! That’s simply not true!! Understanding our global heat distribution and what injecting some 500 gigatons into our thin atmosphere is fairly straight forward, all it takes is a good-faith interest in learning about the indisputable basics.

Why are you making it sound like politically motivated armchair wannabes and dilettante’s deserve to pretend they are smart enough to second guess actual scientific experts? What’s up with that dude?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SoD writes: “The worst you could say is people who don’t accept ‘consensus climate science’ are likely finding …. a little difficult and might have misunderstood, or missed, a step somewhere. …
– – –
How can you write something so naive?

When in the world have ‘we the people’ ever been in a position to sit judge on scientific experts about their esoteric work? – that’s what the community of learned experts is for. To cross check and keep each other honest.

What we do with their information is another matter altogether – but first we need to understand what the “experts” have learned! Oh but that’s been turned into a dirty word too, hasn’t it?

>>> Why not write about what the “consensus” of an expert community means?

You know: the part about “consensus” being the product of the full spectrum of evidence; as distilled by the community of honestly skeptical experts.

Or that the consensus evolves in light of new evidence – which is more than can be said of the endless repetition and stonewalling that the ‘unidirectional skeptical’ Republican/libertarian community is guilty of.

Why have you brought this cynical R/l Meme into your blog? I’d have much rather read you explaining why misrepresenting and lying about what experts are explaining is unacceptable.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SoD writes: The best you could say is with such a complex subject straddling so many different disciplines, they might be entitled to have a point.”
– – –

That’s downright shameful bro! NO they are not entitled to create fairytales and pretend it’s as valid as what actual experts have established!

Why not a word about the politically driven strategic misrepresentation of scientific facts and the dirty tricks being pulled on honorable dedicated scientific experts ???

Why not a word about the Republican/libertarian disinterest in a rational step by step learning process? Instead tossing up one phony PR ploy after another, as typified by W’s one dimensional cartoon comment – even though a little bit of research puts his nonsense into a real world perspective – http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php. What’s up with that?

What I find repulsive, but oh so typical, is this PR machine hijacking something as horrendous as the Holocaust and coupling it with the term “climate science denialist” – It’s political theater for profit, nothing more.

I notice you didn’t even frame that as a question, it was a statement. So what’s your game? What’s all this about??? Why are you playing into their malicious attack on science?

What about defending the cumulative learning process?

You know SoD after my closer consideration of what you’ve done here with your one-sided presentation, I need to revise my previous declaration, because the more I think about it, the more you do seem at worst duplicitous, at best grievously misguided.

You know SoD after my closer consideration of what you’ve done here with your one-sided presentation, I need to revise my previous declaration, because the more I think about it, the more you do seem at worst duplicitous, at best grievously misguided.

Glad you have cleared that up.

You have joined the 4 other people over the last 5 years no longer welcome here.

People interested can read your comments, read this article & comments and the last 5 years of my articles here and draw their own conclusions.

There are two aspects of your contribution, florig, only one of which makes sense to me. From what you and citizenschallenge wrote you agree that explicit comparison with Holocaust denial is fair for many climate dissenters, including, no doubt, myself. Although I find that point of view repugnant in the extreme I would understand your applause for cc to that extent.

What I don’t understand is how you can now class SoD as a den**r blog. Take me through your reasoning there. In what way has SoD proved himself to be like a Holocaust den**r?

Anyone who thinks that this is a CCD blog is not worth your time. If this were the old USENET, both ff and cc would have been added to my newsreader killfile list early on. It surprises me that no one has created a generally usable equivalent for blogs. I guess blog styles are so different that you would need a specific code subroutine for each blog.

DeWitt, I’ve been thinking lots about this very thing – and mentioned the idea at a rather interesting pre-meeting before we heard the great Michael Mann in September in Bristol, with Anthony Watts, Andrew Montford, Nic Lewis and various others I value in the UK dissident scene present. General purpose blog filter, tailored to each user. Its time will surely come.

For now, though, I take the old-fashioned way and defer to the host on any filtering. What ff has said is profoundly defamatory of him and the blog. But that’s the way the D-word blows. If he let this comment stand I thought I’d ask what on earth could possible cause SoD himself to be classed in this way. The utter emptiness, as well as deep malice, of this repugnant label becomes clearer with every such specific example. I meant what I said earlier. I’m in this to win this: for this dreadful abuse of language to stop.

My point is that it’s outlandish to get up-in-arms about calling people who reject observable, demonstrable, climate science – as “Climate Science Deniers” which they most proudly are.

“Denier(s)” is a word that describes a state of mind. – plain and simple

All the rest of this discussion is all about wasting yet more time and energy of useless distractions and non issues, while we continue denying that we are in the process of destroying the foundation of our society and the biosphere that humanity has come to know and depend on, these past many tens of thousands of years – and more !!!

Citizen, this simple science, is less simple than you seem to believe. Sit down for a few hours every day and work your way through this blog. I have learn t more on the science of doom from this site than all the others combined. Ive been reading it since day one(although rarely if ever comment in recent years) Although, i have to admit, i, unlike you havnt been able to accurately quantify the coming climate apocalypse in my head.

You have to understand.. most reasonably intelligent people, see emotive personal attacks, and vague hand waving(generally with simplistic seemingly unrelated analogies) less convincing, than you seem to.

If you want to argue that the atmosphere isnt co2 saturated, by all means point out that the optical path length decreases with altitude, and that raising co2 will increases the path length at these lower pressures higher in the atmosphere, thus increasing the path length out, increasing surface temperatures…

Its not that hard to explain conceptually the “simple” mechanics. And you will find, people are more likely to absorb what you are saying, and maybe in time adjust their thinking.(although not always…) But If your best argument is a vague argument to authority, followed by some childish name calling. All its going to breed is contempt.

You can call people what ever you want, for what ever reason you want end of the day. Although, name calling gives the impression of some one who lets their emotions rule their reasoning. DeWitt Payne i think has your number 😉

Richard Drake says, “Nobody trying to justify use of the D-word has admitted that deliberate comparison of climate doubt with Holocaust D****l is abhorrent. To not admit that is to not give a damn about the original victims of one of the worst atrocities in history.”

For the first part of that statement, my answer is: it’s not abhorrent because in many ways the comparison is justified. And the comparison is not just between AGW d….rs and Holocaust d….rs; the comparison is between AGW d….rs and all other forms of d….l which have in common a propensity for intellectual dishonesty which is displayed in behaviour such as misrepresantations and distortions, cherry-picking, conspiracy ideation, ideologically/politically motivated reasoning lacking logic etc. I might have missed some. Sure, the d….rs will accuse us “alarmists” of doing all these things, unfortunately without much evidence. All you have to do is visit all the main ‘sceptic’ blog sites _ WUWT, JoNova’s etc. to see the low level of discussion and all the dumb, intellectually dishonest rhetorical techniques being used. SoD himself has experience of ‘sceptics’ which cannot be reasoned with on this blog. D..ial has nothing to do with not understanding complex physics or maths that a “12 year old should be able to understand”, but all to do with ideologically motivated cognitive dissonance.

To quote what somebody else said in a comment on another blog, “I have met very few people who call themselves “skeptics” on AGW who are actually skeptics in the real sense of the term. In practice, what they actually seem to mean is that almost no argument against AGW (or for an alternate hypothesis) is too stupid for them to embrace and no evidence for AGW is compelling enough for them to accept.” The last sentence is absolutely spot on and describes exactly why these people are not sceptics but fake sceptics or d….rs. Let me emphasize that: for ‘sceptics’, ALMOST NO ARGUMENT AGAINST AGW IS TOO STUPID FOR THEM TO EMBRACE AND NO EVIDENCE FOR AGW IS COMPELLING ENOUGH FOR THEM TO ACCEPT. That’s not intellectual integrity, that’s not good faith, that’s not scepticism _ it’s d..ial.

When someone of good faith bring up a point/argument/fact that is comprehensively rebutted and shown to be false, you’d expect that person to acknowledge it and hopefully rethink their position. When have any of those who call themselves “sceptics” done that? I’ve never seen it.
But it’s not just your average uninformed and scientifically untrained commenter (I’m one of them) who pushes unsubtantiated an false claims; you have scientists (geologists) like Plimer saying that volcanoes emit 100 times more CO2 than humans, or a couple of years ago Carter telling a room full of people that temperatures hadn’t risen for 50 years _ are those things you just blurt out by mistake, or are they deliberate disinformation? Have they corrected themselves? Have they apologized? No and no. Obviously not mistakes made by people who don’t understand basic science and maths.

For the second part of that statement, “To not admit that is to not give a damn about the original victims of one of the worst atrocities in history.”, that’s totally illogical. On the contrary, the person who makes the association is contemptuous of the mentality and thought processes which give rise to Holocaust d…ial and recognises the same deficient thinking being exhibited in AGW d…ial. It says nothing whatsoever about giving a damn about the victims of the Holocaust, although it strongly implies that the person making the association does give a damn, otherwise why would he be criticising them? The other point to make is that people like me, who have no qualms about likening AGW d..ial thinking with Holocaust d…ial thinking, do not say that because you deny one thing you must also be also be denying the other. People pick and choose what they want to accept or deny according to their particular ideologies and inclinations; all I’m saying is that there’s a certain commonality in the thinking and rhetoric.

Having said all that, to SoD, I’ll finish by saying that you do a great job here, and as a layman, I’m in awe of your knowledge and scientific/mathematical abilities. You’re a true sceptic…as I think most mainstream scientists are.

Oh, FFS, what a tempest in a teapot. The word means “someone who denies” and that is how I will use it in climate discussions.

It does not have to refer only to scientific illiterates who deny the greenhouse effect: denying that adding tremendous amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere entails a genuine risk of catastrophe for human civilization is enough to earn the sobriquet. Those calling Michael Mann a fraud or claiming that global warming has stopped will receive it too, and richly deserved.

The notion that it implies some disrespect for the memory of Holocaust survivors or that it is another way of calling someone a Nazi is an infamous misrepresentation of the intent behind its use in the present context. It means what it says, and D-worders who get their iddy widdo feewings hurt by it can go pee up a rope. I’ve been called a lot worse by them.

What I wonder is how folks like ‘KingO’ and pals can remain so completely blind to the observed changes on this planet over the past few decades.
But then, they don’t feel any obligation to explain anything – they are satisfied with playing contrarians and vandals.

That was good was it? That summarised your position really well? OK, let’s run with that.

Oh, FFS, what a tempest in a teapot. The word means “someone who denies” and that is how I will use it in climate discussions.

Genius. FFS, why didn’t we all see that from the start. You’ve completely solved our problem. How is it possible that someone as smart as SoD didn’t see that?

Actually, let’s back up a stage. Do you think SoD is smart? In other areas, I mean? Have you in fact read this blog before? What do you think of what’s been explained here? Good? Necessary? Or a waste of time, because the guy doesn’t even understand what you do about the D-word. He must be a worthless idiot, right?

How far do you take this? In other words. If someone disagrees with you about the D-word, does that make their opinion about everything else completely worthless?

That’s it. I’m done. I’d be grateful for an answer but I do get the point that when people like me are as stupid as we are it’s often not worth even trying to answer their questions. I do see all that, don’t worry. I see it every day in the climate debate. I wonder where it comes from.

on February 9, 2015 at 8:50 pm |
Pekka Pirilä
Meow,
I do not think that anyone has contested the widespread use of the verb to deny or the word deníal. Certain other forms are the issue.

on February 9, 2015 at 9:27 pm
Richard Drake Pekka: Absolutely right. The misdirection bug – ignoring the real complaint and question and pretending your critics are saying something they are not. The upshot in this case being they couldn’t give a damn about the victims of the Holocaust. And that’s serious.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Feb 10th 1:42am

Nobody trying to justify use of the D-word has admitted that deliberate comparison of climate doubt with Holocaust D****l is abhorrent. To not admit that is to not give a damn about the original victims of one of the worst atrocities in history.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I read the Bishop-hill comment – though that’s not near as clear as you might think.

To me you’re playing with words – When I use Climate Science Denier, that is exactly what I mean. It has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Making such a deliberate comparison with The Holocaust is a disingenuous game that climate science contrarians do to further derail our attention away from the real issues we need to look at and learn about.! (or should I say to keep it derailed)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

That would be fine for me as definition or explanation, if there wasn’t the smear of equivalence with Holocaust denial lurking in background. I have some questions for you and Adam on that, which will hopefully appear at some point!

The questions have appeared, as have two very thoughtful comments from Leonard Weinstein. Based on what he’s written, and your definition, and any additional concern you would have given because he’s Jewish, would you call him a climate change denier?

Sceptics aren’t always so careful as Leonard. Here’s a comment I saw last night on a sceptical blog I was pointed to by a fellow-sceptic I like and respect. It’s no a blog I often read and one I never comment at.

OMG I love this. It’s brilliantly simple. Even the dumbest Climate Liars and their brainless adherents can understand it. And then they’ll ignore it, because the truth is the last thing they want. Still, . . excellent work …

I’ve left off the last two words because they give away where that was posted. You don’t need to know that to pick up that this is pretty content-free, apart from the encouragement factor to the host of that blog. But note this: this guy obviously thinks there’s “one directional skepticism” going on from (a lot of) consensus people. Would he be entitled to call them science deniers as well as liars, based on your definition?

You’d disagree I’m sure that he would be right to do so. I ask though to make you think. Does such an extreme label help?

What you’ve written earlier justifying equivalence or near equivalence with Holocaust denial is utterly repugnant and wrong-headed. You can’t compare attitudes to events in history with those you suspect may take place in the future. Especially an event in history as serious as the Holocaust. I agree with everything SoD wrote initially but I think this point about past and future needs to be more thoroughly explored. But what of those questions about your current definition?

The foundation of Climate science denialist types is the relentless repetition and repackaging of known, demonstrable lies – big lies, malicious lies,
and these are linked to an absolute refusal to allow compelling legitimate evidence to be incorporated into their thinking, because it’s contrary to their agenda.

You won’t find that within the climatological community.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Just have to look at two of the ‘biggest scandals’ climate science denialist types have fabricated.

The “hockey stick” which was pioneering work, perhaps less than perfect, though damned good, but then when is pioneering science ever perfect in 20/20 hindsight – yet denialist types twist and misrepresent and have convinced themselves and use every deception to convince others that it was some great act of fraud – absolute rubbish.

The other “un-skeptical scandal” the ClimateGate emails, where some malicious souls had to trawl through thousands and thousands of private, after hours, emails amongst colleagues – to dredge up a very few impolite rants (that were actually rather understandable given the background) – nothing from science papers, nothing but fabricated smoke and mirrors innuendo. But, they run with it and run with it.

And it’s all designed to keep our collective eye’s off the prize of seriously learning about our global heat distribution engine.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Even your comment underscores that love affair with word games and the art of debating for distraction and profit, over substance – that’s not how it works within the halls of science – with it’s constructive debates built on representing facts and arguing about those and learning as they go along.

A focus on gathering and understanding the evidence at hand, rather than deceptive word plays aimed at avoiding the evidence.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If that’s the best you have for a “question” I’m sorely disappointed.

And it remains as simple and clear as:
“One directional skepticism equals denial!”

You were expecting something good from me then? Where did that expectation come from? You’ve given me the impression only of having complete contempt for me. Am I wrong? Did you have some previous experience with me that was positive?

I’ll single out, if I may, my latest question, lightly edited. I don’t know when it came out of moderation and therefore when you may have seen it.

The questions have appeared, as have two very thoughtful comments from Leonard Weinstein. Based on what he’s written, and your definition, and any additional concern you would have because he’s Jewish, would you call him a climate change d****r?

This strikes me as a good question, because it’s precise. You’re responses have been very general. I’d like you to consider this very specific question. Thanks.

As a coda of sorts for this corner of the debate – may the reader forgive the Panglossian noun but one has to travel in hope – here are a couple of quotes from cc in his final contribution to this blog.

Since then RD got me to revisit Weinstein’s cartoon comments

Cartoon comments? Pity we never got a chance to know precisely what was meant by that. Or perhaps not.

Why not a word about the Republican/libertarian disinterest in a rational step by step learning process? Instead tossing up one phony PR ploy after another, as typified by W’s one dimensional cartoon comment – even though a little bit of research puts his nonsense into a real world perspective – http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php. What’s up with that?

This I found hard to parse from dear old Blighty. Happily cc achieved more clarity by the end of the post and earned himself a lifetime ban. My interest here is solely in what one can tease out on Leonard Weinstein. The author read Leonard’s two comments because of me but didn’t feel able to address my question – or at least didn’t make that a priority above defaming the host. Would he have been happy to write Weinstein off with the D-word? His contempt for the guy is clear enough. But common-a-garden contempt, so pervasive in the climate debate, is on a quite different level from that horrific moniker. It’s consider bad form to speak ill of the departed so I’ll conclude that cc drew back from going on the record addressing this careful Jewish scientist that way. Not having the decency and courage to say so the moment he was asked can’t be considered good but it’s surely best to assume that the worst wasn’t going to happen.

..Making such a deliberate comparison with The Holocaust is a disingenuous game that climate science contrarians do to further derail our attention away from the real issues we need to look at and learn about.! (or should I say to keep it derailed).

please look at my complete quote, which by the way was to RD:
~~~~~~~~~
“And then citizenschallenge said on February 11, 2015 at 5:25 pm:

“I read the Bishop-hill comment – though that’s not near as clear as you might think.

To me you’re playing with words – When I use Climate Science Denier, that is exactly what I mean. It has nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Making such a deliberate comparison with The Holocaust is a disingenuous game that climate science contrarians do to further derail our attention away from the real issues we need to look at and learn about.! (or should I say to keep it derailed)”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wasn’t pointing at you SoD ! Hell you’ve tried more than most to get the discuss back to the fundamental basics everyone needs to comprehend before anything else about AGW makes sense.

I don’t believe you ever made “such a deliberate comparison” –
The way I’ve read this is; You’re thinking about and commenting on something you’re observing in the internet dialogue. There’s a very big different between that what others are doing.

I think some others around here come closer to it, but not you.

{It’s sort of like the Free Market libertarians crying about how climate change mitigation would hurt the “poor third world peoples” as though they ever gave a rats ass about those people before (or now).
It makes a good distracting advertisement, it’s the feel good spot, nothing else.}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So to be clear, I have no idea what in the world compelled you (SoD) to jump into this slim pit – but that doesn’t make you what you are talking about.

Mr. Drake, Look at what you wrote up there
(February 11, 2015 at 3:45 pm),
try to image reading it from the outside looking in.
You think maybe you went over the top there ?
What are you talking about anyways ?
~ ~ ~

SoD, I cannot speak for citizenschallenge, but I don’t see anything disingenuous about your original post. In fact I very much appreciate the scrupulous intellectual honesty I’ve seen on display in this blog over the years.

I hope he meant it is the so-called contrarians who are disingenuous: whining about being associated with Holocaust d’ers, hoping to deflect the valid charge that they are denying one or several scientifically valid conclusions re. the climate.

While some are obviously wrong and it’s right to try to improve their understanding, it’s not right to condemn or ridicule them for that. (I’m not referring to people, who are genuinely bad.)

For me the word d..r or it’s translation to Finnish does not mean much. Holocaust d..ism is essentially unknown in Finland, but I do believe that the word has strong connotations for many others, in that it’s similar to n..r.

Words are, however, just the tip of the iceberg, the more general issue of tolerance of diversity is really the core. Unfortunately people may also be highly selective in their tolerance. On one issue they may be among the most tolerant, on another extremely intolerant.

Net discussions are a place where we may possibly see an overpresentation of extreme intolerance as such attitudes are likely to lead to the perceived need to comment. Discussion related to climate policy is an example of that. A few cases that I see to represent such intolerance can be found also in this thread.

Yes, Pekka, you have hit the nail on the head. Also progress in science depends on tolerance of diverse opinions. Leaders should actively solicit opinions and thinking from all their team members even if the thinking is uncomfortable. Correct decision making requires unbiased fact and data which can only come out if all views are discussed clearly and forcefully.

I also agree there is self selection in blog commenters and those who are attracted to this medium are often the most vocal and aggressive personality types and also they tend to uncivil behavior. i have not always been perfect myself in commenting either. I do think its worth making the effort though because blogs can be very important scientific tools.

Someone beginning with G who thought radiation in opposite directions cancelled out “because they are vectors”.
Someone beginning with K who wasn’t able to be civil or discuss actual points raised by others.
There might have been another one, or maybe that was just a threat.

It’s been a surprise to me that so few people have been thrown out into the street by the Science of Doom bouncers.

The focus on science, along with the necessary maths, probably causes most potential troublemakers to leave early.

@DeWitt Payne: Some science here would be nice, wouldn’t it, but that wasn’t the post.

As far as this d-worder is concerned, the post just considered what is – not how much of it there might be. 2-6°C? I thought this was supposed to be a quantitive science? Climate sensitivity to CO2 2°C (currently probably even less) = no noticeable difference under the noise. 6°C = who knows?

“So with these two elementary principles we can prove that more GHGs means a higher surface temperature before any feedbacks. That’s the ‘greenhouse’ effect.”
– Which GHGs are you talking about?
– “a higher surface temperature” – where is this surface exactly? Do you mean ‘surface’ as in ‘surface’?
– In the text immediately preceding you talk of radiation from insolation (I think, it’s not clear). I thought the GH effect referred to upwelling radiation.

“many people think that the amplifying effect, or positive feedback, of water vapor is programmed into the GCMs… it’s crystal clear that positive feedback isn’t “programmed in” to climate models.”
– If it isn’t programmed in to them, where do they get it from? The feedback fairy? A parameter must be passed in sometime.
– However, if your statement is true, where are positive feedbacks processed?

“So GCMs all come to the conclusion that more GHGs results in a hotter world (2-6ºC)”
– I don’t find 2-6° very impressive, actually.
– Which GHGs are you talking about here?
– Er… SST trend has been FLAT for 18+ years, despite all that lovely extra CO2.

“They solve basic physics equations in a “grid” fashion, stepping forward in time, and so the result is clear and indisputable”
– The result is neither clear nor indisputable.
– “basic physics equations”. It doesn’t matter whether they are basic physics equations or not, if they are inappropriately or incorrectly used the result will be incorrect.

The result of GDM’s is not “indisputable.” Like all CFD simulations there are very significant numerical and nonlinear errors that cause an error band for these results. What is programmed in is the laws of physics with very complex unresolved sub grid models of complex processes like clouds. The simulations in this complex setting are very difficult to judge.

Your questions, which are off topic for this post, are answered in other posts on this blog. Several links are given in the post above. For example, there’s a list of the primary GHG’s in this post, which was linked in the post above. More links are in that post.

RichardSmith: unnecessary complaining. All the scientific argument in this post was to demonstrate that such things are not instantly understandable by a 12-year-old, unlike the evidence for the Holocaust. Any debate of the scientific points – especially petulant debate – detracts from that extremely important point. DeWitt’s right to point you to other SoD pages.

I didn’t write all the (guess) 300+ lines “evidence behind the science of anthropogenic global warming” at the beginning of this post. S_O_D didn’t write them on another web page, he wrote them here.

They were followed by (guess) 20+ lines saying we should not use the d-word.

If S_O_D doesn’t want comment (IMO civilized, calm, questioning comment) on what he wrote in the 300+ lines, **don’t write them**. If he does write 300+ lines they need to stack up. I listed (calmly and reasonably) a number of points in those 300+ lines that seemed to me to be unclear and asked S_O_D (politely and calmly) to explain.

My comment on tolerance and the use of the d-word that Peka raised is still in some garbage bucket on the site. It was also calm and reasoned. I asked about what happened to it but have received no reply.

DeWitt Payne says ‘Can we get back to science now?’. As soon as I pick up on the 300+ lines of ‘science’ he tells me I am off topic.

‘Jp’ insults me by saying ‘I slipped in to peddle the usual d-word nonsense’, thus himself violating the rule set by S_O_D in the post.

Now you come along and write of ‘petulant debate’ and ‘unnecessary complaining’.

You also assert that the evidence for the holocaust is understandable by a 12-year-old. I write and speak German fluently and the evidence for the existance of the holocaust is clear to me. That evidence is not accessible to a 12-year-old. **Evidence** is not a TV documentary.

There seem to be a lot of very angry people on this site who are so beclouded by their anger that they do not read what others write nor do they engage their brains with what others say.

It’s discouraging for sceptics to think their take on the scientific debate is all-important, when the subject of a particular thread is not the science but something far more important. Showing I suppose that lack of moral clarity isn’t the sole preserve of any tribe here.

Back to the science means new posts on different subjects, not redirecting comments on this thread. Why should I waste bandwidth reposting material that already exists? You were off-topic for this post. If you can’t be bothered to read different posts that address your questions and post comments there, I suspect that answers were not on your agenda. In which case, you won’t be missed.

Hi Jp. I’m really interested in your phrase ‘usual d….r nonsense’. This could be really helpful. Are you saying that if SoD allows what you consider wrong reasoning to stand on this thread, without making clear his contempt for these views, he himself has become a ‘d….r’?

I’ve always been struck in the past with the very polite tone of the science-based threads here. I don’t think the host wants to delve into the scientific arguments on this thread so he left these two comments as is. Is his very politeness evidence of SoD being a ‘d….r’?

So, after x hundred comments in a worthy discussion about not using the d-word…
…I get the d-word for asking, camly and politely, a few questions directly based on the original post.

Don’t you find that strange?

I’m still waiting for some response to my questions. I won’t hold my breath.

It always amuses me that the people who throw the word ‘science’ around most are the ones who flee from any questioning and resort to banning completely inoffensive posts from any one who disagrees with them.

So, after x hundred comments in a worthy discussion about not using the d-word…
…I get the d-word for asking, camly and politely, a few questions directly based on the original post.

Don’t you find that strange?

I find it strange. I didn’t use that term.

I find it “almost strange” that the label has also been applied to me to. But in the highly polarized religious zeal surrounding discussion of climate it seems that almost anything is possible.

I’m still waiting for some response to my questions. I won’t hold my breath.

It always amuses me that the people who throw the word ‘science’ around most are the ones who flee from any questioning and resort to banning completely inoffensive posts from any one who disagrees with them.

We haven’t met before. You must be confusing me with some other people in a completely different place. You were upset by others. But that’s not my fault. So zip it up.

I haven’t banned you. I haven’t banned your post. I haven’t “fleed from any questioning”.

I’ve been working 15 hour days recently.

Check the blog SLA (service level agreement). Oh, now I remember – there isn’t an SLA.

Here is an answer I starting writing yesterday to an earlier question of yours:

RichardSmith,

Remember that this article had its satire component. So what I noted as “simple” and “obvious” was definitely not, and the “answers” were glossed over. Not everyone got the humor, which makes it even more fun (for me).

That means that your questions cover a large scope of this blog, which has very involved answers, as well as very involved questions..

Then the La Quinta Inn in Rogers, Arkansas (don’t stay there if you want internet) dropped out for the 20th time and I decided I would try and reboot the laptop to see if it would fool the overloaded useless hotel router to let me back on for a longer time. And of course I had to save my half-written answer in a text file – it couldn’t be posted anyway, not without walking across the frozen road to the Starbucks once again to get an internet connection..

No violins please, people.

If you want an answer to your question ask it again and I might take a look.

On the other hand, rude people who hastily assume their questions are too fabulously clever for anyone who might be expected to disagree with them to answer – and write comments to that effect rather than keeping those thoughts to themselves – those people might just be ignored anyway.

Sadly, there are a lot of people in the U.S. and in Europe even today, which think that our pollution activity is not related with the climate changes and they continue to burn fossil fuels each day which increase the global temperatures.

To confirm the phrase “pollution activity” one only has to look at this photo, used by the Canberra Times two days ago to illustrate a story on CO2. The issue on this thread, though, is whether questioning the likely scale of warming or its future impacts ever deserves the epithet D****r, because of that word’s clear allusion to malign doubt about the reality of the Holocaust.

This seems an appropriate thread to thank the contributors and especially SoD himself for a blog on climate generally free of the extremist partisan silliness from both sides of the debate.
If you had any misgiving about throwing out some activist over this thread please know that lurkers like me can go to any number of waffle climate blogs if we want to read about evil Koch brothers conspiracies or ” it’s all a hoax by the UN” nonsense.
Please keep doing what you are doing and in particular your enjoyable writing style which makes hard core maths a little less a chore and more a puzzle.

Although only a sporadic lurker on this blog I couldn’t agree more Paul. And a superb achievement has just been made ten times greater for me by this post.

However, one thing hasn’t been resolved to my satisfaction and that’s those who use Denier yet swear blind – to coin a phrase – that they neither intend, nor that the phrase entails, any connotation of equivalence with those evil and dangerous people who deny the Holocaust.

That was the situation on 1st February with Mark Maslin, the climatologist at UCL in London, a college with which I have strong personal connections, whom I knew from friendly encounters on The Conversation. Despite warmish (if not warmist) feelings towards the man I saw him using ‘CC deniers’ of sceptics and went nuclear with the n-word in response. Why?

Because that sleepy Sunday morning I’d just read this piece by a well-known Jewish journalist in London called David Rose. I’d recommend every remaining lurker on this thread to do the same. For along with the d-word come some very ugly words and thoughts indeed, at least if you put your head above the parapet to the extent David has in the UK. (One of David’s biggest critics, Nick Cohen, is also a Jewish journalist in London. The landscape is never less than complex.)

David takes d****r as connoting holocaust denial and in the case of Nick Cohen the equivalence is absolutely explicit. But is the British climate lukewarmer justified to take this view? Here’s how he starts:

I’ve never supported the British National Party or the Ku Klux Klan. I’ve never belonged to the Paedophile Information Exchange, or denied the Holocaust, or made a penny from the banking crash.

But if you read The Guardian newspaper’s website, you might think otherwise. A commentator on it urged my own children to murder me.

He did so because of one of the many stories I’ve written for this newspaper about climate change. I first reported on the subject nearly six years ago: my article was about the ‘climategate’ scandal, where leaked emails showed university scientists were trying to cover up data that suggested their claim the world is hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years may be wrong.

Ever since then, I have been labelled a ‘climate change denier’ – a phrase which, since I happen to be Jewish, has particularly unfortunate connotations for me.

And this is despite the fact I believe the world IS warming, and that carbon dioxide produced by mankind IS a greenhouse gas, and IS partly responsible for higher temperatures – and have repeatedly said so.

Despite all the ugliness described by David in the Mail on Sunday, Mark Maslin, who I assume hadn’t read that piece, was adamant that his use of the d-word was innocent of all charges:

A pretty lengthy exchange followed, towards the end of which I tried to explain more carefully why I felt Mark’s defence wasn’t adequate. Lightly edited here to remove Twitter handles, use first names where possible, expand shortened forms and conjoin tweets into reasonably sensible sentences:

My point to Mark Maslin two days ago is once 1 is in play others are null and void. Term must be shunned. It’s also striking how little uniformity there is on definition. And how most sceptics don’t fit any. Another reason to give up using it. But that’s a 1% reason. 99% is the holocaust denier slur.

Mark: ‘Denier’ seems to be correct English and any insult is imagined to allow righteous outrage.

Barry: C’mon. It’s rhetoric aimed at shutting people out of the debate. I deny no science. Sceptics/deniers have been [asserted to have] moral equivalence to holocaust deniers.

Richard: Mark, Science of Doom disagrees with you (h/t @omnologos). He says stop using it. He says a lot else before coming to that conclusion. You should read it very carefully.

Maurizio Morabito: Maslin and Betts are blind on the topic.

Richard D: Richard doesn’t use Denier that I remember. His silence on this has been a surprise.

Richard Betts: That’s the trouble with you Maurizio. You actually *do* make stuff up.

Maurizio: I am not the one expecting “denier!” utterers to have an open mind.

Richard D: I don’t pretend I can see inside his heart. But clarity on Denier would be welcome.

Richard B: Hi. I don’t use denier. Quiet cos I have work to do. PS Maurizio makes weird stuff up and blocks me.

Richard D: Appreciate you don’t. Science of Doom has given the clearest exposition why not.

Mark: Richard, as you find the term extremely offensive I am very happy to stop using it. And I always use climate change sceptic in my books.

Richard D: OK, appreciate that greatly.

I still do appreciate it greatly, as I do the excellent reasons Richard Betts later gave for those more of the consensus view than me disavowing the term. It’s also worth noting that Mark’s express decision seemed based solidly on Mosher‘s pragmatic and personal arguments, not anything higher-blown. No worries. Whatever works!

One other reason to repeat this interaction in full – the most successful I feel I’ve ever taken part in on Twitter – is to highlight the very helpful influence of the host here, in the nick of time 🙂

Sorry mods I used the d word
Ignore post awaiting moderation I have edited as below

To Mr Drake

Well of course the word “d” is calculated to cause as much offence and to paint non consensus people in the most damaging way possible
Of course it is a direct association with holocaust “d”.

To pretend otherwise is plain old garden variety dishonesty.

I thought the opening post in this thread made that point in the most obvious way.

To be honest though enough of the general population is becoming aware of the over cooking of confidence and the reluctance to acknowledge uncertainty to such an extent that they now assume those using the whole “d” thing as rubbish and the person using it as having little credibility.

In fact I believe this tactic is discrediting the very real science behind agw and lending weight to the equally silly ” it’s all a UN scam ” meme.

I agree with all of that Paul. I’ve come to feel though that removing the d-word from the debate will really change that other d-word. There’s only room for one d-word. Real – and difficult – debate should be it.

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon…who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who d..y [] the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work….

Dr. Soon also received at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation….

I’d almost forgotten about Soon, which is anecdotal evidence about his relative unimportance.

That also does not disprove Soon’s hypothesis, although it does show him to be a stealth advocate rather than an honest broker. But as we know from other sources, there are lots of stealth advocates on the AGW side, even if they haven’t been as unethical about it as Soon.

Along those lines, I’d like to know who is paying Mann’s legal fees in his nuisance (in my opinion) libel suit against Mark Steyn and National Review.

It isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic. The climate sensitivity is usually quoted as the number of degrees of temperature increase for a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, from 280 ppmv pre-industrial to 560 ppmv. Doubling again to 1120 ppmv would result in the same change in temperature. But even if it were linear, which would be worse than logarithmic, the value of the slope of the temperature vs CO2 concentration curve, the sensitivity, would be important.

I got to the end, with the aid of that speed-reading course I once did at school. (I did well compared to others. Leaving increasingly vast tracts out always seemed the best way.) This is from the first comment. (Someone else read this in full? There’s no need to make such an inhuman assumption I’m sure.)

… I have observed in [t]he past that while SoD is clearly capable of grasping the mathematics underlying climate science, and therefore acknowledges the legitimacy of mainstream climate science, he has always displayed a certain reluctance to engage with the implications of his science.

As a result our reluctant hero hasn’t run into d****rs of sufficiently diverse shapes and sizes, it is suggested. This thread may mean his eyes have been opened at last. Glad to have been of service.

There also seems to be some rowing back on the idea that SoD himself is now a d****r. That was always going to be a bit of a stretch. I think the anti-D-stuff movement has decided that’s not the way to play this.

While confidence in the radiative transfer calculations is 90% or greater, the confidence in the implications is far lower. RT calculations are meaningless unless you know the atmospheric profiles. That requires AOGCM’s. It’s not at all clear, as documented here, that the current crop of AOGCM’s produce reliable results, nor are the scenarios used to drive them particularly realistic. The next step, consequences, as reported in the IPCC WG-2 reports, has even lower confidence, with lots of references to the gray literature. It looks more like hysterical hype, a la Chicken Little, than a carefully thought out, science based effort.

Finally, there are the mitigation/adaptation costs in the WG-3 reports. Those have a confidence level even lower than WG-2 with and even higher percentage of gray literature citations. I also see a lack of seriousness in the resistance to nuclear power and natural gas from hydraulic fracturing by many who are otherwise demanding immediate and drastic action. Replacing coal with methane is not a permanent solution, but it would slow the rate of increase of CO2 emissions. If one actually believed that continued unrestricted use of fossil fuels will result in hundreds of millions of excess deaths, then even events like Chernobyl and Fukushima would be trivial by comparison.

Rather than shooting ourselves in the foot, as Germany is currently doing by trying to replace nuclear electricity with wind and solar, a policy of no-regrets actions and research in nuclear generation systems that are not prone to catastrophic failure would seem to be the way to go. The German Energiewende would not be possible at all if France didn’t have excess nuclear power generation capability. The same is true for Denmark’s wind energy, which is backed up by Norway’s hydroelectric dams.

I have observed in [t]he past that while SoD is clearly capable of grasping the mathematics underlying climate science, and therefore acknowledges the legitimacy of mainstream climate science, he has always displayed a certain reluctance to engage with the implications of his science.

We have very many blogs that discuss the implications of climate science. The value of this site is just in the difference. One more site, indistinguishable of all the others, would not make the valuable contribution this site makes.

(DeWitt Payne: Reporting from Germany, the Energiewende is doing well. The French have several times been saved from freezing their atomic butts by help of Barvarian solar PV. The French grid is less reliable than the German grid. Lesson: Don’t rely an a few centralized big generators, distribute, diversify. Hmm, actually our stupid Barvarian Ministerpräsident dosn’t yet get the important tech detail that this requires more power lines. But else, all is good, or was last time I looked, doing the daily grid prognosis for Barvaria in 2012.)

I don’t really want to enter the discussion here again — but a book just came to my mind while commenting at Rabett’s. It’s required reading for anybody interested in the phenomenon of d*****. And lo, my search tool says it’s not yet mentioned in this loong thread:

Florifulgurator writes: “Reporting from Germany, the Energiewende is doing well … Hmm, actually our stupid Barvarian Ministerpräsident dosn’t yet get the important tech detail that this requires more power lines. But else, all is good, or was last time I looked, doing the daily grid prognosis for Barvaria in 2012”

Glad to hear that things are doing well with the German Energiewende, despite the fact that you pay twice as much for electricity as France and three times as much as the US. If you are lucky, the cost of the additional power lines that are required can be hidden in your taxes instead of being included in your electricity bill.

Florifulgurator writes: “The French have several times been saved from freezing their atomic butts by help of Barvarian solar PV. The French grid is less reliable than the German grid. Lesson: Don’t rely an a few centralized big generators, distribute, diversify.”

Bavarian PV electricity may have occasionally kept French atomic butts cool on hot summer days, but it has does little to warm them on cold winter days and nothing to warm them on cold winter nights. And on sunny summer days, there is such a glut of solar power, the French can purchase what they need at bargain rates. Perhaps your government will install some more pumped storage so that solar power can be saved to keep German butts warm on calm nights. Pumped storage typically only doubles the cost of solar and wind power, so the added cost shouldn’t be much of a problem.

BTW, the French are the largest exporters of electricity in the world and have more than a few (58) nuclear reactors. Since German planners expect negligible output from wind and solar some of the time, your grid is has been equipped to deal with their unreliability.

(Frank, it actually happened in winter that we had surplus PV to help France, who have a lot of electrical heating. German economy is doing ridiculously well, despite electricity prices. Plus, new business is pushed by the Energiewende. But yes, you’re right with the glut/storage problem. Often enough surplus PV goes to Austria or Switzerland for nothing. They pump store it (all Swiss dams are dual) and then sell it back to us. At the end we need a whole interconnected European electricity market, and Bavarian PV might even end up pump stored in Norway.)
At first glance this seems unrelated to the climate debate. But not seeing the opportunity for the problem is a major driver of d**** – particularly (and amazingly) with engineers and economists.

Florifulgurator: I found the website below with historical PV electric output by date and hour. (Given that the average French nuclear power plant produces about 1 GW of electrical power, we can convert German PV output into French nucs.)

In the four or eight weeks around the summer solstice of 2014, maximum output in any 15 minute period was 26.1 GW.

During the four weeks around the winter solstice of 2014, the maximum output was 6.2 GW (24% of peak, about my estimate). On a few bad days, the maximum output peaked at 1 GW, but a 2 GW max was a typical bad day.

In the eight weeks around the winter solstice of 2014, maximum output in any 15 minute period was 10.6 GW (41% of peak, between our estimates).

The first day in 2015 that reached your 60% of peak estimate was 2/26, when the output spiked to 18.5 GW. So good days like this one are possible a month before the equinox, which surprised me.

Despite these numbers, you still can NOT replace a single French nuclear plant with German PV, because the nucs provide baseload power 24/7 (about 330 days a year). PV do not. German PV PLUS pumped storage CAN replace a nuc, but about 50% of power is lost in the storage process.

If you take Wikipedia’s figure for annual German PV output and divide by the hours in a year, the average output is only 4 GW – about 1/6 of peak output. Optimistically, only 1 GW would be lost storing power for night time use, so the entire Germany PV infrastructure (on the average) is equivalent to 3 French nucs (5% of their capacity).

Did German PV ever keep French butts warm? Even on the BEST DAY in the four weeks around the winter solstice of 2014, the entire German PV output couldn’t replace one French nuc with the help of pumped storage! On the BEST DAY in the eight weeks around the winter solstice of 2014, it could replace about ONE nuc. As spring approaches (but it is still cold), the sun is higher and more help is possible.

It is a useful point to remember that nuclear does best on base load and solar on peak load, so they by definition work well together, something that might or might not please both sides. As an aside, the French have a number of hydro storage facilities to try and handle this issue for their nuclear fleet.

Eli
Solar works well with peak load only in cases, where it’s guaranteed that peak load coincides with peak demand. That may be the case in some arid sunny regions, where air-conditioning leads to the peak load, but elsewhere solar is very bad in contributing to peak load. Here in Finland it has essentially zero contribution to that, while nuclear contributes it’s share also to peak load.

Florifulgurator wrote: “Frank, it actually happened in winter that we had surplus PV to help France, who have a lot of electrical heating.”

Frank asks (politely): How could it happen? The figure linked below compares the highest summer PV output to the lowest winter PV output. I can’t find any info on the best winter PV output by hour, but I’d guess it might be 25% of summer output for perhaps five hours a day – outside the hours of peak demand. If several French nuclear plants were down, a few hours a day of electricity from German PV (during months of peak German demand for electricity) won’t be much help. Given typical weather, German PV certainly doesn’t provide a reliable source of energy in the winter.

Florifulgurator also wrote: “Often enough surplus PV goes to Austria or Switzerland for nothing. They pump store it (all Swiss dams are dual) and then sell it back to us.

Frank notes: Swiss pumped storage capacity is 1.7 GW according to the link below. Peak German PV output in the summer is about 20 GW, so the Swiss appear capable of absorbing less than 10% of German PV output. Given that the Swiss are hoping to expand to 4 GW of pumped storage capacity, I wonder if “all of there dams” are dual purpose at the moment. If I did my calculations correctly, average hydroelectric output is about 4 GW and peak capacity must be greater. I see that the Swiss have a fairly ideal system: nucs for baseload power generation, hydro to meet variable demand and pumped sop up nearly-free excess wind and solar power from Germany that can be sold later at a profit.

I said Austria or/and Switzerland. Dunno who gets how much. So it seems Austria gets most. It’s actually not such a big deal, and is overhyped from both sides. I don’t recall what winter PV vs. summer was, but I bet avg. winter noon is at least 60% avg. summer noon. And I recall one such chilly but clear and sunny winter day: French nukes maxed out, some not running, but lots of electrical heating (unlike Germany who heat mostly fossil). And we had quite a bit of PV to share. — Anyhow, the volatility of wind/solar disperses and averages out quite a bit when distributed over large area. There’s more than just Germany, Austria, Switzerland…

Dunno from where I got that “all dams dual in Switzerland”. Maybe it was about some new ones. (Plus, pumping is quite complex logistics, so absolute numbers are not the full picture.)

I’d also be happy about relieble english links. Haven’t looked for 2 years. And there’s lots of propaganda and bad reporting.

————–
Anyhow: there’s no shooting in the foot whatsoever with German Energiewende, and no dependency whatsoever on French nukes. It’s a give and take in a complex market, and you can easily cherry pick details for whatever point you like to stress. (Haha, maybe the Finns have shot in their foot with the French EPR reactor under construction in Olkiluoto. O nuclear fantasies…)

Debates on the economics of renewables may be interesting but how can they possibly strengthen the right of those on the ‘consensus’ side of any part of any climate or energy debate to imply that their opponents are as malign as Holocaust D****s in all areas (for this is always how the term is used)? On the weekend I watched the second part of the film here, all 280 minutes of it, due to expire tomorrow on the BBC iPlayer after a month since a swathe of such gruesome and sobering programs were put on in memorial of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Anyone who denies this history commits a gross offence against human compassion and decency. As SoD has shown beyond doubt, any disagreement about climate, starting with the ‘basics’ of atmospheric physics, is of a completely different kind.

The sad thing is that we should be debating the economics rather than the science. The costs and benefits of various policies to mitigate or adapt to the consequences of increased levels of ghg’s have nowhere near the level of certainty of the science. Trying to shout down people who don’t think the costs of immediate, massive investments in wind and solar are justified by long term benefits by using ad hominem arguments, including the d word, is not debating, no matter how good it sounds to the peanut gallery at advocate web sites. That applies equally to both sides of the argument.

Discussing economics and also technology linked with the economic considerations is important and sorely lacking. It’s probably impossible to find in those fields as much most might agree on as it is in physical climate science. Most of what SoD has covered on this site is not really controversial, but finding as much of interest in the economics of climate change without introducing highly controversial material is probably very difficult.

That applies also to the IPCC reports. In my view full WG1 reports are mostly not controversial, some details surely, the main part not. The same is not equally true of the WG2 and WG3 reports. I would classify a major part of the most significant conclusions of these reports controversial.

I don’t think that anyone has tried to do the same with the economics of climate change as SoD has done with the physical science.

The costs and benefits of various policies to mitigate or adapt to the consequences of increased levels of ghg’s have nowhere near the level of certainty of the science.

Absolutely. Not forgetting the science of feedbacks in the real atmosphere and oceans, “all other things not being equal”, is highly uncertain.

Pekka:

Discussing economics and also technology linked with the economic considerations is important and sorely lacking … I don’t think that anyone has tried to do the same with the economics of climate change as SoD has done with the physical science.

Very good point.

Given all this I was trying to tease out an important aspect of use of the D-word. Not only is it obviously more and more inappropriate as the subject matter becomes more and more uncertain. And even on something as basic as CO2 saturation SoD has shown it’s not just inapt but betrays a disgusting lack of care for the victims of one of the worst crimes in history.

Yet that’s not all. As I pointed out early on in the discussion the D-word is never qualified. Disagree with a holder of the consensus flame in one part – even in a very, very debatable part – and you are written off as if all your opinions on all parts of the climate debate are as bad as Holocaust denial.

The lack of reason involved would be laughable but for factors, by far the most important of which is respect for Holocaust survivors and descendants of its victims, which means it is no joke at all.

DeWitt: There is a hell of a difference between an ECS of 2 and 4 degC or even 2 and 3 degC. It isn’t obvious to me that science must always provide policymakers with the wide range that the IPCC has reported for the past quarter century, especially now that we have an additional quarter century of satellite observations. (It’s too bad that ARGO didn’t start with the satellite era. If we could look at the intersection – rather than the union – of TCR/ECS determined by multiple techniques we might be able to make more progress. The problem is that the IPCC’s “ensemble of opportunity” doesn’t EXCLUDE any possible future because they don’t systematically explore parameter space. So climate models can’t solve the problem; they simply create the illusion of an answer. And it may be that models with high ECS will look increasingly improbably once high sensitivity to aerosols is ruled out.

Frank: With respect, exactly how uncertain ECS is, or how unlikely an ECS of 4°C is (where I’m likely to be very sympathetic to your view), should not really detain us on this thread. The value of ECS is far more uncertain than mainstream science having got CO2 saturation wrong and SoD’s crucial point is that the evidence for CO2 saturation, and things like it, is fair harder to grasp for the ordinary person than the evidence for the Holocaust. And thus the D-word is wholly inappropriate for people who cannot grasp the arguments for CO2 saturation, let alone much more uncertain matters.

Yet this powerful and humane argument has been disputed, not least by Florifulgurator. Getting into side arguments may divert attention from this very worthwhile ‘single issue’. There are many other SoD threads where estimation of climate sensitivity can be discussed. Here it’s a distraction.

There is a hell of a difference between an ECS of 2 and 4 degC or even 2 and 3 degC.

Is there? How do we know this? Even then, it’s not at all clear that mitigation strategies involving large investment as soon as possible in wind and solar are cost effective compared to adaptation. Risk management always deals in uncertainty both in the probability distribution function for the risk as well as the distribution functions of the costs of the consequences and the costs of the different strategies to adapt to or mitigate the consequences. But people like Roger Pielke, Jr., who actually know something about this and write sensible books and articles, are vilified and subject to Congressional investigation because they don’t toe the Chicken Little line.

One of the most agonising aspects of Shoah are the descriptions by Filip Muller, a Czech in the ‘Special Detail’, Jewish prisoners who were forced to assist with the dirty business of getting arriving crowds at Auschwitz, who’d been told throughout that they were going to be resettled, into the Undressing Room, without provoking panic, then into the ‘showers’ ie gas chamber, then dispose of the bodies by cremation and clean up the vomit and excrement.

He tells of a day things didn’t go to plan. One of his colleagues recognised a woman in the Undressing Room as the wife of a close friend. He warned her that they were all going be ashes within three hours and how it would happen. Knowing him as trustworthy she tried to tell others but nobody would believe her. In Muller’s own words “Mothers carrying babies on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that.” I’m pretty sure he actually said such victims were in denial.

The distraught woman was held back from the gas chamber, tortured in front of the Special Detail until she revealed who her informer was. He was then thrown live into the flames of the crematorium.

And they criticise the Jews for not resisting.

Holocaust denial, from the comfort of one’s armchair in 2015, is totally vile. But, like Filip Muller, I have the deepest sympathy for a mother with baby in arms who wanted to hope against hope in 1943 or 1944. Blaming the victims has a long and vile history in all this.

The use of comparison with current-day denial of such horrific historic reality, in any part of the global warming debate, needs to be shunned forever.

“This is so simple. Feedbacks are things like – a hotter world probably has more water vapor in the atmosphere, and water vapor is the most important GHG, so this amplifies the ‘greenhouse’ effect of increasing CO2. Calculating the changes is only a little more difficult than the super simple equations I showed earlier.”

Calculating such changes seems useless, as the so-called water vapor feedback doesn’t operate in isolation. It’s effect is directly interconnected with the effects of clouds, which are fueled by evaporated water. The real question is incremental reflection of solar energy from clouds greater or less than the amount of energy delayed beneath the clouds — on global average? Or what will be the net radiative effect of clouds on incremental warming?

Plot of average surface temperature to cloud amount:

The inflection point around 0C is where the net effect of increasing/decreasing clouds switches from cooling to warming and warming to cooling. That this inflection point is roughly where the surface reflectivity, due to the presence or not of snow and ice, clearly indicates why the net radiative effect of clouds changes in response to a change in surface reflectivity. Above about 0C, the average net effect of clouds is to cool, i.e. more solar power is reflected than is delayed beneath the clouds, where as below about 0C, the average net effect of clouds is to warm, i.e. more solar energy is delayed beneath the clouds than is reflected away in total (due to the reflectivity of snow and ice being about the same as the clouds).

At approximately the same point that the clouds start to increase again (above 0C) in the prior above plot is also where increased water concentration in the above plot no longer results in further rise in temperature. The fundamental physical mechanism(s) behind this is beyond a certain temperature there is so much water being evaporated, removing so much heat from the surface (as the latent heat of evaporation), providing so much ‘fuel’ (i.e. water) for cloud formation, that the combination of cloud caused (from solar reflection) and evaporative caused cooling overwhelms any increase in atmospheric opacity from increased water vapor.

It’s important to note that this plot:

does not establish causation in either direction. Rather it simply establishes that above about 0C, the more cloud covered surface there is — the cooler it is on monthly average, and below about 0C, the more cloud covered surface there is — the warmer it is on monthly average (at least where water vapor is not saturated around 300K); and that this is independent of why average cloud coverage is what it is in a particular location. That is, the data in the plot does not establish a physical reason why average cloud coverage is what it is in a particular grid area, latitude or hemisphere. In both hemispheres, the average cloud coverage is roughly highest in the higher latitudes. The reason why the plot is so significant is that the data points are composed of the total cloud amounts independent of the combination of cloud types that make up the amounts.

These plots here are what establish causation for temperature changes to cloud changes (again 25 year averages from the same data set):

Note how as the incoming solar energy increases, the cloud coverage increases, and as the incoming solar energy decreases, the cloud coverage decreases. Note how in both hemispheres the average surface temperature stays well above 0C. This suggests the fundamental mechanism that maintains the energy balance appears to be that, on global average, increasing cloud coverage causing cooling (more solar energy is reflected than is delayed) and decreasing cloud coverage causes warming (more solar energy is absorbed than exits to space). Or that in the aggregate, when clouds are increasing, the surface is too warm and trying to cool, and when clouds are decreasing, the surface is too cool and trying to warm. That is, these counter balancing mechanisms dynamically maintain the energy balance.

If anything, in a warming world there would be a little less snow and ice, which is the opposite of what’s needed for the net radiative effect of clouds acting to further warm — instead of remaining to cool (i.e. resist warming) — on incremental global warming. It’s agreed that the global average net effect of clouds is to cool by about 20 W/m^2, which is very large amount.

BTW, this analysis of the data I’ve outlined is completely consistent with the results Lindzen is getting looking at tropical data (and then extrapolating to the poles) in his latest 2011 paper with Choi, where they get a fairly strong negative feedback in the tropics which then becomes weaker when ‘shared’ over the globe.

*For the satellite data plots, each small dot represents a monthly average for one grid area for a 2.5 degree slice of latitude. The green and blue dots are the 25 year averages for each 2.5 degree slice of latitude (1983-2008). From right to left, it goes from the tropics to the poles.

That is, unless you’re claiming that clouds will decrease in response to warming, which seems highly unlikely and physically illogical given that evaporated water is what ultimately fuels the formation of clouds. It’s very unlikely that the net radiative effect of clouds is also to warm on incremental warming, especially given the net radiative effect is so strongly to cool. Thus it’s very unlikely the combined feedback of clouds and water vapor is net positive, which makes 2-4C per 2xCO2 very unlikely.

If water vapor is the primary amplifier or warming, what’s the controller? If not clouds through their ability to reflect more solar energy back into space than is delayed beneath them and ultimately precipitate the water out of the atmosphere, then how is the energy balance so tightly maintained given how immensely chaotic and dynamic the system is?

RW: Where is your data from? It would be more useful with a more complete description. “Surface Out” may mean something to you, but everyone else must guess.

Let’s start with some basics: What causes clouds to form? Surface temperature? Your plot of surface temperature vs CA (percent cloud cover?) and discussion seem to suggest that you are thinking along those lines. Does evaporation cause clouds to form? Neither of these is right. Rising air causes clouds to form. For air to rise in one location, it must descend somewhere else. That descending location will not be cloudy, no matter how warm or humid it is.

Is warmer air more likely to rise than cooler air. Possibly, but spontaneous vertical convection is controlled by the lapse rate, not just surface temperature.

The Hadley and Ferrel cells cause air to rise at certain latitudes and subside at others. The intensity of incoming solar radiation (and therefore temperature) also varies with latitude (and season). A correlation between temperature and cloudiness may not be due to causality, because both depend on latitude.

All of these components interact with each other, so I doubt you will find any simple cause-and-effect relationships with clouds.

FWIW, according to ERBE and CERES, OLR and reflected SWR FROM CLOUDY SKIES don’t change appreciably as GMST warms and cools 3.5 degC every year. (I’m talking about the absolute GMST, not the temperature anomaly.)

‘Surface out’ means the radiant power emitted from the surface as consequence of the measured surface temperature as dictated by the S-B law with an emissivity of 1.

“Let’s start with some basics: What causes clouds to form? Surface temperature? Your plot of surface temperature vs CA (percent cloud cover?) and discussion seem to suggest that you are thinking along those lines. Does evaporation cause clouds to form? Neither of these is right. Rising air causes clouds to form. For air to rise in one location, it must descend somewhere else. That descending location will not be cloudy, no matter how warm or humid it is.

Is warmer air more likely to rise than cooler air. Possibly, but spontaneous vertical convection is controlled by the lapse rate, not just surface temperature.

The Hadley and Ferrel cells cause air to rise at certain latitudes and subside at others. The intensity of incoming solar radiation (and therefore temperature) also varies with latitude (and season). A correlation between temperature and cloudiness may not be due to causality, because both depend on latitude.

All of these components interact with each other, so I doubt you will find any simple cause-and-effect relationships with clouds.”

The key point is the moisture that ultimately condenses into clouds has it’s original origin from evaporated water from the surface, and the clouds are the means by which this evaporated water is ultimately returned back to the surface (in the form of precipitation). So yes, there are a confluence of factors that determine how much and what types of clouds form and where. However, in my interpretation of the data makes no assumption about either mechanism.

All that is established by the plot of cloud amount vs. surface temperature is above about 0C, the more cloud covered surface there is on monthly average, the cooler it tends to be, where as the less cloud covered surface there is, the warmer it tends to be. Where water vapor saturates (i.e. where increasing water vapor no longer results in a further rise in temperature is also where the cloud amounts start to increase again as the data goes into the tropics (and even curls back the other way somewhat in one hemisphere). If the effect of these additional clouds and additional water were to further warm, the temperature would increase more and more as the water and clouds increased, yet the exact opposite is what occurs. This suggests the net feedback of clouds and water vapor is strongest in the tropics and gets progressively weaker as you move from the tropics to the higher latitudes, and even becomes positive once you cross over the 0C threshold which is roughly where the surface becomes snow and/or ice covered.

The fundamental physics of this should be fairly easy to see. When the surface is snow and/or ice covered, the reflectivity of the clouds is roughly equal to the reflectivity of the surface. Clouds are more opaque to upwelling IR from the surface and lower atmosphere than the clear sky is, thus the net effect of incremental clouds is warm by delaying more energy beneath them than is reflected away in total. When the surface is not snow and/or ice covered, by and large the clouds are more reflective to solar energy than the surface so more energy is reflected away than is delayed beneath the clouds and the net effect of clouds is to cool rather than warm.

Moreover, a big component of the feedback debate involves the direction of causation for temperature changes cloud changes. That is, cloud changes can both cause temperature changes by varying post albedo solar input (forcing), and they can respond to temperature changes (feedback). When using globally average data, it’s very difficult to distinguish one from the other, because the changes in temperature are so small, i.e. there is a lot of noise in the data that needs to be filter out.

The big advantage of looking at the data in this way is the overwhelming and obvious distinction between cause and effect, i.e. ‘forcing’ from feedback.

That is, in each hemisphere, the temperature changes are overwhelming caused by the large changes in incident solar power and the cloud changes slightly lag or coincide with the temperature changes. In other words, it’s overwhelmingly obvious the cloud changes are not causing the temperature changes.

It’s important to note that the dimensionless gain in the plots, quantifies the net feedback acting on the changes. The gain being out of phase with the input energy source (in this case post albedo solar power) is the signature of system that is controlled by net negative feedback. That is the net feedback in response to the changes is negative, i.e. as the surface warms and and the clouds increase, warming is resisted, and while the surface cools and clouds decrease, cooling is resisted. If this was not the case, the gain would increase as the temperature increased and vice versa.

I should add that the referenced 1.1K of so-called ‘no-feedback’ is based on the 1.6 to 1 power densities ratio between the surface at the TOA, where 3.7*(385/239)= 6.0 and +6.0 W/m^2 from a baseline of 287K equals about +1.1K.

Or the global average 1.6 to 1 power densities ratio between the surface and the TOA (i.e. 385/239 = 1.61) is the claimed ‘zero-feedback’ gain, where +1K = +5.3 W/m^2 of net gain from a baseline of 287K and 5.3/1.6 = 3.3; and 3.3 W/m^2 is the ‘zero-feedback’ flux change at the TOA for +1K.

Mainstream climate science doesn’t seem to realize that dimensionless gain in W/m^2 quantifies the same thing in regards to feedback and has the exact same physical meaning.

BTW, the advantage of this approach is the use of long term averages (multiple decades). This is because climate change is principally a change in the average steady-state surface temperature of the system. The short term behavior and net effect of clouds and water vapor is largely chaotic and unpredictable, where as if you look at the long term averages, a clear pattern of net average behavior emerges. The idea is the plots in my original post provide the average net dynamics of clouds and water vapor (albeit separated by hemisphere), and which is what is applicable for how the average dynamics would change in response to climate change.

I would argue that what the data reveals simply had to be the case, because basic physical logic says the Earth atmosphere system must be some form of a control system because its energy balance so dynamic and chaotic, yet is also extremely stable on average. A control system doesn’t even work if the net feedback in response to imbalances is positive (let alone 300% or more positive). Mainstream climate science seems to have the causes and effects of clouds reversed so far as how they are interpreting the data. The data I’ve presented is that from a system analyzer who has performed the kind of analysis one would use to reverse engineer and unknown, but measurable system.

The system analyzer is following the protocol established and widely used in standard systems analysis, for which I note those in the atmospheric science community seem to not be able to fully understand for some reason. However, as best I know there is nothing about the climate system that somehow exempts it from the same decades established rules for analyzing and characterizing systems.

I’m sorry, I didn’t spend much time pondering SoD’s apparent intent, i.e. satire, in this article. It wasn’t so much that I overtly missed it — it’s that I wasn’t on the look out for it. I guess my posts would be more appropriate for another thread.

Feel free to move my posts to an appropriate thread. Is there a thread that deals with the somewhat tricky issue regarding the direction of causation for temperature changes to cloud changes? If I have any significant criticism of your blog, it’s that much of the stuff covered, while interesting, isn’t germane to accurately quantifying the incremental effects of an enhanced GHE, i.e. net feedback and sensitivity.

Also, that the so-called ‘basic physics’ says the climate should be pushed in a warming direction by increased GHGs is trivially true, as there are who knows how many pushes, both warming and cooling (natural and anthropogenic), occurring at any given time.

The critical question in the debate, is what is the combined net feedback acting on energy imbalances. That is, primarily what is the direction of the net combined feedback of clouds and water vapor. So-called mainstream or ‘consensus’ climate science says this is likely to be 300+% or more net positive, and which I find physically illogical to say the least. Highly dynamic and chaotic, yet extremely stable systems on the whole (i.e. systems with very tightly maintained energy balances such as the Earth’s climate) generally do not function or behave this way, let alone have the two most dynamic components of the whole atmosphere (water vapor and clouds) driving the net positive feedback of 300+%. Yet this is what we are supposed to believe and fear.

I would argue that accepting this is perhaps even more absurd than refusing to accept the so-called ‘basic physics’ of the GHE, but like anyone, I certainly can be wrong. However, I have not seen what I think amounts to anywhere near clear evidence in support of that much positive feedback. In fact, the evidence I’ve presented supports that if anything, as the climate warms, the net feedback becomes more negative.

Although this is an older post, I just found it and totally agree. Due to the length of the comments, I have skimmed but have not read all, but the main issue I have is why there are so many supporters that don’t feel they can make their argument without resorting to insults and ad hom attacks, including calling people d****rs, yet are so adamant about ignoring the implicit reference to the Holocaust.

Again, due to the length of the comments I don’t know if this info was referenced earlier, bot for those that d**ied the link to the Holocaust and demanded references, the following is a quote by Ellen Goodman in a Boston Globe Op-Ed specifically linking global warming d****rs with Holocaust d****rs as far back as 2007 :

“I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

(“No change in political climate” By Ellen Goodman,Boston Globe Op-ed, February 9, 2007)

“my attempts to prove things like the “greenhouse” effect – using equations, arguments and experiments.”
I felt aggrieved by the certainty of your arguments until you said you were just being sarcastic.
Several questions that bug me.
Temperature at night drops rapidly and goes up during the day depending on the level of Greenhouse gases.
The temperature that it rises to during the day must reflect the amount of GHG and the sub amount of CO2 present,
To my mind this should mean there is no real lag time with respect to a GHG level dictating a temperature level.
Secondly energy in equals energy out so the amount of energy present to heat the air doesn’t change.
* Therefore is it possible to have a hot blanket of air and a colder land or sea temperature? in a warming [atmospheric] world?
Does the earth and sea have to heat up over time or if the energy is in balance would it just be the air that gets a few degrees warmer and which would “go away at night”.
*The second question is why do you have to be so sure about GHG and water vapor only being an add on forcing. As you know there is a lot going on about clouds and balance of temperature by more clouds more albedo to the stage where such feedback might be negative.
If there is more than one effect possible in a complex system you should not rule out other possibilities no matter how much you attempt to prove AGW.
On this score you state
“GCMs all come to the conclusion that more GHGs results in a hotter world (2-6ºC). the result is clear and indisputable.”
This fails the science test with a range of 2.0 to 6.0 degrees.
CO2 causes a known rise in temperature [GHG effect] which you could state independent of models.
The fact that given said CO2 input GCM can range 4.0 degrees in their expected effect make them neither clear nor indisputable.
Sorry for my intemperate attitude.
pleased for any scientific feedback, particularly on the first question which is ignorant rather than evil.

Angech2014 asked: “Therefore is it possible to have a hot blanket of air and a colder land or sea temperature? in a warming [atmospheric] world?”

Probably not. The surface of the planet absorbs SWR (currently about 160 W/m2). If the atmosphere were warmer than the surface, the 2LoT says that there can’t be a net flux of energy from a colder surface to a warmer atmosphere. Relatively little (currently about 40 W/m2) of thermal IR emitted by the surface escapes DIRECTLY through the GHGs in the atmosphere to [cold] space. This imbalance means that a lot of energy (currently about 120 W/m2) would go into heating the surface of the earth until it became warmer than the atmosphere.

I presume our host was being sarcastic when he wrote: “GCMs all come to the conclusion that more GHGs results in a hotter world (2-6ºC). the result is clear and indisputable.”

Angech2014 wrote: “Secondly energy in equals energy out so the amount of energy present to heat the air doesn’t change.”

There are a number of fallacies in what you wrote above about forcing (energy flux imbalance) and temperature change. SOD has a link at the top of each post called “Confusion over the Basics” and there are several great posts on energy transfer basics that are fundamental to understanding.

Energy in equals energy out ONLY when the temperature of the material gaining and losing energy is not changing. When an imbalance exists, conservation of energy requires that the difference comes from or is added to the “internal energy” (temperature) of the material. The heat capacity of the material tells us how much energy (Joules) is needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of material by 1 degC. However a Watt is a Joule per second, so an imbalance measured in Watts actually translates into an initial RATE of warming – NOT an AMOUNT of warming. You need to know amount of material being warmed and its heat capacity to calculate this rate. When the imbalance is measured in W/m2, you need to know the heat capacity and amount of material per m2 – which translates into the DEPTH of the material being warmed in the case of the ocean. The top 30-50 m of the ocean (the mixed layer) is stirred by the wind and acts as if it were in equilibrium with the surface.

There is always a lag between an imbalance (or forcing) and the resulting temperature change. The more material involved; the longer it takes for its temperature to change. Given the heat capacity of the atmosphere and the top 50 m of the ocean, one can calculate that a radiative imbalance of 1 W/m2 can warm the surface of the planet at an INITIAL rate of about 0.2 degC per year. On the other hand, about 300 W/m2 of daytime SWR warms mostly the top 1 m of a quiet lake, producing an initial warming rate of approaching 0.7 degC per hour. (This explains why the water at your feet feels colder than at the surface.)

Once you have considered the initial RATE of warming/cooling, then you can sensibly consider the equilibrium AMOUNT of warming/cooling that will be observed sometime in the future. Since all objects give off more (or less) thermal radiation as they warm (or cool), temperature change will eventually eliminate an imbalance between incoming and outgoing energy. The S-B equation can be used to calculate the equilibrium temperature change (dT) for a forcing (F): F = eo(T+dT)^4. We can calculate that a 3.7 W/m2 forcing from 2XCO2 will produce about 1 degK of warming at equilibrium, but only if nothing else changes. We expect many changes – feedbacks – as the earth warms or cools, which can amplify or suppress the no-feedbacks warming expected for 2X CO2. If you believe the IPCC, doubled CO2 will raise temperature by 1.5-4.5 degK. Therefore, a forcing first produces an initial warming (or cooling) RATE – which slows as the temperature changes (partially correcting the imbalance) and which gradually approaches an EQUILIBRIUM CHANGE. The initial rate decreases with a negative exponential. If equilibrium climate sensitivity were 3.7 degC for a doubling of CO2 (a 3.7 W/m2 forcing), then we would eventually expect 1 degC of warming to eventually result from each 1 W/m2 forcing. At the above initial warming rate of 0.2 degC/year, it would take 5 years to warm 1 degC. However, after 2.5 years, the earth would have warmed about 0.5 degC, thereby reducing the net forcing to 0.5 W/m2 and the warming rate to 0.1 degC/year. We could roughly estimate that we should be near the equilibrium warming of 1 degC in a decade or two. By that time, however, some heat has penetrated below the top 50 m of ocean. When a greater depth of ocean is being warmed, the heat capacity is greater and the warming rate becomes even lower. So it should take a century or more to approach equilibrium after a doubling of CO2.

Thanks Frank, still set in my views but appreciate the explanation and will think about it.
Long time for equilibrium if ocean warms with 2nd law.
but atmospheric changes should be nigh on instantaneous to amount of CO2 in air, feedbacks not required.
the fact this is not seen to happen is very concerning.
If heat is indeed going into the oceans and the oceans take millenia to warm then any current change in atmospheric temperature cannot be put down CO2 effects as it will take ages to happen?
In other words current warming patterns would have no relevence to CO2 levels in air in the time frames we are commenting on.

Angech2014: It is usually much harder to re-learn something you’ve learned wrong than it is to learn it (right) in the first place. Most people won’t even try.

You said: “atmospheric changes should be nigh on instantaneous to amount of CO2 in air”. You could quantify the meaning of “instantaneous” by remembering that there are 14.7 lb of air above every square inch (or about 10,000 kg/m2). Air has a heat capacity in J/kg/K and absorbed radiation provides a certain number of J/s. I’ll leave it to you to calculate an initial warming rate. If you use the intensity of solar radiation, hopefully this will produce an answer similar to the rate at which air warms every day after the sun rises.

From the climate science perspective, the atmosphere and the mixed layer of the ocean warm together. Every summer, seasonal warming can be detect down to a maximum depth of 60-100 m, so changes in solar irradiation must penetrate to about this depth within a few months (because of turbulent mixing from winds). Average warming occurs at 30-50 m, the depth of the layer used to calculate heat capacity.

I mean the atmosphere with C02 at whatever level goes through a known rate of heat [energy] gain and loss each day and night. In Darwin the temp might go from 15 to 33 degrees over 6 hours at the surface.
[Near instantaneous in a context of talking temps over 100 years]
I am sure the expected heat with greenhouse gas effect is what we see for the current level of CO2.
If it was to be increased by 30 ppm magically overnight the temp the next day would go up to 33.3 degrees in that 6 hour period and down to 15.3.
We have a reasonable increase in CO2 the energy increase should be obvious, why is it not occurring? why does real life not follow the models?

angech2014 wrote: “If [CO2] was to be increased by 30 ppm magically overnight the temp the next day would go up to 33.3 degrees in that 6 hour period and down to 15.3.”

If only life were this simple. Radiative forcing depends on the log of [CO2] or the number of doublings. 2^0.1 = 1.072. 30/400 = 0.075. So an increase from 400 to 430 ppm is about one tenth of a doubling. One instantaneous doubling of CO2 reduces OLR by about 3.7 W/m2, so your forcing will be about 0.37 W/m2. Now we can ask how quickly this forcing can change the temperature of the 10^4 kg of air that lie above every square meter of the planet. To calculate total warming at equilibrium, you need to chose an ECS. If you chose 3.0 degC for a doubling, the equilibrium warming will be your value of 0.3 degC.

In France, the only word is “negationiste”, equivalent of “holocaust d…r”. We are called “Negationistes du climat”, ambivalence is not possible in French. J. M. Jancovici, a prominent advocate of global warming and nuclear power said of scientist and “sceptic” Vincent Courtillot that he is the “professeur Faurisson du climat”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Faurisson

“Everyone knows what this word [denier] means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.”

Quite a statement. Is claiming everyone that using the term denier is making a reference to holocaust denial the good etiquette you desire?

All the dictionaries in the world cannot remove the stain of explicit comparison with Holocaust Denial in the climate case. Nobody has met my challenge of 45 days ago. Hypocrites doesn’t even come close.

I am happy to see that there are TV programs that can have an objective view om climate. Not the usual exaggerations. I have seen a couple of parts of: Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Adventure, from BBC. It is presenting the basics in a very proper and understandable way. Recommended.

DeWitt: “But people like Roger Pielke, Jr., who actually know something about this and write sensible books and articles, are vilified and subject to Congressional investigation because they don’t toe the Chicken Little line.”

What? Nearly a dozen times for the same darn thing? Or not? Because if not, then Michael Mann indicates that the causation CANNOT be “because [he] don’t toe the Chicken Little line”.

But despite that, Rog is under investigation as to whether he lied to congress in hearings. That, unlike “faking the science” is a federal crime. Far more serious. And the facts appear to be such as to justify the investigation.

And aren’t you, Rog, Tony et al always exhorting us to “follow the money”? Seems when the money followed is going to d*rs (more on this in a footnote), we shouldn’t follow the money, and doing so is a witch-hunt….

footnote: SoD, you are entitled not to like the word d*r, or for yourself associate it always and immovably to the holocaust. That’s your right.

What you do NOT have the right to do is to insist what *I* mean with the word, nor anyone else, unless you go and get the dictionary changed.

You don’t get to create insult just because you don’t like the word, you don’t get to tell me what I mean. Just like I don’t get to tell you what you mean.

The fact that you do so and insist that, since this is your blog and you’re not a government, therefore you can do this and it isn’t “censorship” (it is, by the way, just not censorship disallowed by the US constitution) is why I don’t bother posting here any more.

This discussion has been going on for over six weeks now, so I’m unembarrassed to contribute my $0.02 now. I’m exasperated at assertions that the d-word in question, when used in the context of anthropogenic global warming, explictly implies equivalence to rejection of the historical fact of the Nazi campaign of extermination against Jews in Europe. People making those assertions seem unaware that Deacon Dodgson had their numbers 150 years ago:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

I’m on Alice’s side. “Deny” have been used by English speakers for “to refuse to accept or admit (something)” since the 14th century; along with its derivatives “denial” and “denier”, it requires explicit statement of the thing being denied. When “AGW-” or “Holocaust-” aren’t explicit, they can usually be determined by context. It’s merely tendentious to claim that d-words, even with a qualifying noun or context, must be associated with the Holocaust, and anyone who says they might be misconstrued is an enemy of clarity.

The use of “denial” as a term of psychological art, “in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence”, was introduced in 1925. That was after Arrhenius demonstrated that coal burning would result in global warming, but before the world had heard of Adolph Hitler. The Holocaust is hardly the only thing that can be irrationally denied.

The term “AGW-denier” is thus appropriate for someone who rejects any of the following propositions for which there is both overwhelming evidence and lopsided expert consensus:

1. That the Earth’s climate is warming;

2. That the warming is anthropogenic;

3. That if warming continues on its trend of the past 40 years, many (for reasonable values of “many”) people now alive will experience catastrophic (for reasonable values of “catastrophic”) effects.

I will freely admit that “deny”, “denial” and “denier” are pejorative in the context of AGW. IMO each of those three propositions are well-enough supported by evidence that sincerely rejecting any of them is denial in Freud’s sense. If you are offended when I use those words, you have accurately taken my meaning. You may claim to be a principled “skeptic”, but I say you are in denial of AGW because it is too uncomfortable for you to accept it. Your claims to scientific sophistication ought to embarrass you, but you’ll stand behind them rather than admit you’re just unwilling to internalize the climate costs of filling your gas tank or turning your house lights on.

Of course many of you are fully aware that your position is scientifically untenable, but have cynical motives for your AGW-denial. Your affected outrage may fool the credulous, but fewer and fewer of them as the evidence mounts against you.

Those who reject only the third proposition are in some ways the most reprehensible AGW-deniers. You are using the word “catastrophic” to mean just what you choose it to mean: “not for me or anyone I care about”, because poor people living in places you don’t are of no consequence to you. And arguments that such people are better served by economic development than by curtailing Tyndall gas emissions ring hollow, when one recognizes that effective development aid is no more forthcoming than carbon taxes are. The truth hurts. Deal with it.

Thus, the claim that “AGW-denier” is equivalent to “Holocaust-denier” is easily seen as a transparent rhetorical tactic: those making it merely wish to be master. Neither I nor anyone else has any reason to concede mastery to them.

Richard Drake, you apparently didn’t read past my first paragraph. That’s OK, I didn’t really expect you to. I trust those who did grasped that Alice was Dodgson’s intended role model, and mine. Without phony respect, I was comparing you to Humpty Dumpty.

Alice would take D****r to allude to Holocaust Denial (though not necessarily that it ‘explictly implies equivalence’, as you say), just as SoD and many others not normally considered climate dissenters take it. Only H Dumpty would say it means what he says it does, without reference to prior usage. And only HD would refuse to condemn those who have made the analogy with Holocaust Denial absolutely explicit, because his use belonged in a bubble solely of his own making, with no responsibility for either perceived meaning or other users who have stained the climate debate with explicit comparisons of the foulest kind.

And only HD would refuse to condemn those who have made the analogy with Holocaust Denial absolutely explicit,

I hereby condemn those who have made the analogy with Holocaust denial absolutely explicit But they are existentially free to make that explicit analogy, just as you are to make it automatically implicit. My response to both of you is the same: you can try to make a word with a history far older than 77 years mean what you want it to mean, but that won’t make you the master of this debate. You don’t get to define the language for the rest of us.

Those who deny any of the three factual propositions I listed in my first comment, do so for reasons having nothing to do with science, and everything to do with unwillingness to pay the full cost of producing the benefits of fossil-carbon-fueled economic prosperity. They are trying to justify letting people who don’t enjoy those benefits pay the costs of AGW. In that context, “denier” is a simple statement of fact. If it hurts an AGW-denier’s tender feelings to be called that, I’m scarcely going to apologize.

Mal: Was the MWP catastrophic? Was the LIA beneficial? Was the warming that ended the LIA catastrophic? Was 20th century warming catastrophic? Was the roughly 5 degK! of GW that ended the last ice age and produced the Holocene Climate Optimum (warmer than today) catastrophic? SLR was 120 m!

Perhaps you better define “catastrophic warming” QUANTITATIVELY in terms of a minimum rise in GMST from TODAY representing catastrophe. Is +1 degK enough? +2 degK? +3 degK? Are others allowed to disagree with your choice or are you da Fuhrer on this subject? Before you decide, you should know:

1) In 1996, a meeting of European environmental ministers decided we should limit warming to 1.2 degK above today (2 degK above “pre-industrial” – the LIA).

2) Most economic studies assert that net benefits will increase with future warming. Some say benefits increase up to +1 degK. Benefits erode with further warming and eventually become loses.

The IPCC has said that ECS might be as low as 1.5 degK for a doubling of CO2. Business as usual will produce levels about twice those today. That would put us around +1.5 degK higher at the end of the century. Are they den*ers?

14 authors of Otto (2013) – including several IPCC Lead Authors – concluded that the most likely value for ECS was 1.9 degC. Are they den*ers?

Of course, if you believe in applying the precautionary principle to worst-case scenarios at any cost, considering any other option represents denia1.

“The pause in warming is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they argue from their analyses. A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. “In the end, global warming will prevail,” says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt”

“But the Hadley Centre group took the next step, using climate modeling to try to quantify how unusual a 10-year warming pause might be. In 10 modeling runs of 21st century climate totaling 700 years worth of simulation, long-term warming proceeded about as expected: 2.0°C by the end of the century. But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat.

From this result, the group concludes that the model can reproduce natural jostlings of the climate system – perhaps a shift in heat-carrying ocean current – that can cool the world and hold off greenhouse warming for a decade. But natural climate variability in the model has its limits. Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and “we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,” the Hadley Centre group writes. And that resumption could come as a bit of a jolt, says Adam Scaife of the group, as the temperature catches up with the greenhouse gases added during the pause.”

First you should define how having to let your 60-year-old pecan trees, the source of your livelihood, die because your irrigation water’s been cut off too early in the season is not catastrophic for you. Or maybe not being able to sell your house on the seashore, that you’ve just finished paying off the mortgage on, because it’s just become uninsurable? How about having your subsistence garden destroyed and your coral-block-and-thatch house, that you built by hand, blown away by a typhoon? Would that be catastrophic enough for you? Hmmm?

<blockquote Are others allowed to disagree with your choice or are you da Fuhrer on this subject?
Right, like I’m going to have you arrested you for denying that you’re willing to let people who cook over a three-stone wood fire pay for your electricity. Even in Germany you have the legal right to deny AGW, despite not having the legal right to deny the Holocaust there. Just another way that AGW-denial is not equivalent to Holocaust-denial.

Mal: Those almond trees exist mostly because the state of California promised cheap water to politically connected agricultural interests even though historical records predicted that such promises would be hard to keep. Paleoclimate studies have identified far worse droughts in the past. Government subsidized crop insurance or price supports may have played a role. I could also mention the fact that environmentalists have succeeded in diverting much water to the delta in an attempt to protect an endangered fish.

People have been building houses in dangerous locations near the seashore partially because the government subsidizes the cost of flood insurance. Banks won’t make mortgages without flood insurance and the home owner isn’t being asked to pay the full cost of the risk he is assuming.

Hurricane Katrina wasn’t a disaster because sea level was a few inches higher and the Gulf of Mexico was a few tenths of a degree higher. The government didn’t spend the money to properly protect the city from a hazard that was known long before CAGW became popular.

Your inability or refusal to quantify what you mean by CAGW makes holding a sensible discussion impossible.

Eli: I may have been misunderstood. I believe most, if not all, studies show benefit from recent warming that will continue into the future. The most optimistic say benefits will increase through +1 degC, fall off, and become losses in the vicinity of +2 degC. Things get rapidly worse above that. Others think the drop-off will begin at a lower temperature. Is this a fair summary of the spectrum of opinion that exists?

Mal Adapted appears to have been misinformed by all of the publicity over extreme weather into thinking that 20th century warming has been harmful.

Would you be willing to pick and justify a minimum warming that defines catastrophe? (A repeat of the loss of part of the GIS might be your best bet, but that won’t be much of an economic catastrophe if it requires part of a millennium.)

Mal Adapted appears to have been misinformed by all of the publicity over extreme weather into thinking that 20th century warming has been harmful.

Nope. You’re just in denial. You’ll believe anything but that your comfort and convenience could cost other people their homes, their livelihoods and even their lives, if not already then within a few decades “if warming continues on its trend of the past 40 years”. BTW, pecans aren’t almonds, and they are grown in other places besides California. That’s a clue that you’re the one who’s misinformed.

What’s really sad is that if you put the time in to educate yourself more completely, you’d find you didn’t need to cling to denial. You’ve allowed your fear of being asked to accept responsibility to keep you from accepting the facts, but your fear is unfounded to begin with. If you were willing to support a modest carbon price on fossil fuels (I favor a revenue-neutral carbon tax myself, perhaps to include cement and beef), market forces would drive the transition to a non-fossil-carbon energy economy with a minimum impact on prices. Any price increases you did see would be internalizing costs that would otherwise be paid by people in Bangladesh and Tuvalu. You could continue to enjoy a first-world lifestyle while giving those people enough time to reach for prosperity themselves. Wouldn’t you rather believe that, than believe that the basic physics you learned in high school is all wrong?

Mal: I’ve spent lots of time into studying CAGW, but I haven’t kept track of which fruits and nuts were harmed by which drought. I assume pecans refer to the Texas drought in 2011. What are the facts? Precipitation in Texas has increased by 1.5″/year (6%) over that last century, so there is no reason to attribute the lack of water for your pecan trees to aGHG-induced climate change. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us Diminished precipitation was attributed to La Nina, the PDO and the jet stream; all forms of natural variability. Stationary Rossby waves are often associated with long periods of extreme weather, but climate models don’t predict an increasing tendency for stationary waves.

On the other hand, aGHGs increased the heat experienced during the drought, intensifying it. According to the IPCC, climate change before 1950 was mostly due to natural variability. If 1901-1950 to represents normal Texas climate, JJA of 2011 averaged 3.2 degC higher than normal (according to BEST), while temperature since 2000 has averaged 0.77 degC higher than normal. So aGHGs could have been responsible for up to 25% of the excess heat. Since one standard deviation in the 3-month average temperature was 1 degC over 1901-1950, what used to be a 1-in-a-1000 extreme event has become a 1:100 extreme event.

So the 2011 drought was a rare chance event modestly enhanced by aGHG’s.

Despite the pecan trees lost in the 2011 drought, Texas produced above normal crops of pecans in 2012 and 2014.

There are a lot of things to like about a fully rebated carbon tax, but SOD isn’t the right forum for this non-science topic.

What are the facts?…So aGHGs could have been responsible for up to 25% of the excess heat. Since one standard deviation in the 3-month average temperature was 1 degC over 1901-1950, what used to be a 1-in-a-1000 extreme event has become a 1:100 extreme event.

Well Frank, perhaps you’re not an AGW-denier after all. You rather convincingly modelled the sophistry die-hard deniers engage in, though. So indulge me for a few more words: if a 1 degC increase makes a 1-in-a-1000 extreme event a 1:100 extreme event, what will a 2 degC increase do? 4 degrees? 6 degrees? Quoting myself again, “if warming continues on its trend of the past 40 years”, it’s certain that more-intense tropical storms, rising sea levels, dwindling water supplies, heat waves, withered crops, burning forests, etc., etc., etc., will be catastrophic to the people who experience them directly.

OTOH, if government intervention can make alternative energy sources and infrastructure even slightly more price-competitive with fossil fuels, the market will do the rest, and there need not be more than 1 degC of additional warming at equilibrium. Some investors’s assets will be stranded, but I certainly don’t have a problem with that ;^). So comment on online newspaper articles! Write your congresscritter! Better yet, show up at her “town hall” meetings and hector her to support a carbon price. And don’t hesitate to heap scorn on AGW-deniers publicly. This isn’t a time for polite circumlocution. If anything will forestall the onrushing catastrophe, it is the courage to speak truth to denial and thus to power.

Few of the regular commentators here are GW- or even AGW-den1ers, but some may be CAGW-skeptics. Which is why I asked you to quantitatively define how much warming constitutes “catastrophic climate change”. Depending on what evidence one thinks is most reliable and whether moderate emission reduction occurs (not an absurd 80%), future warming may not be catastrophic. Rising fossil fuel prices, improved technology and adaptation may be enough. It better be, because I have little faith in the ability of my government and other governments to deal EFFECTIVELY with this problem. Whatever developed countries do will be negated by increase emissions from developing countries.

If a future Texas drought occurs after the global has warmed 2 or more degC, it is fairly obvious what to expect from the numbers I cited above. So far, the best evidence is that average precipitation will increase modestly with global warming. There have been two other years of exceptionally low precipitation similar to 2011 since 1900, so you might anticipate another two or three such events a century. Global warming (0.8 degC) contributed about 25% of the +3.2 degC hot spell, so 2 degC will contribute more than half. What is now a once-a-century event will become a several-times-a-century event and the once-a-century event will might be +4 degC. Since we are a much richer society, with a bigger safety net, more irrigation, air-conditioning, etc., I suspect that less severe droughts in 1900-1950 caused more disruption than 2011’s once-in-a-millenium event. When the 2011 event re-occurs some time in the future, you should be in a better position to manage: Crops engineered for heat and drought resistance by genetic engineering, better water management, accurate seasonal weather forecasts, etc. If you had lived through a drought during the Dust Bowl, would you have foreseen all of the progress over the next 75 years that minimized the tragedy in 2011. Progress will make the next drought less disruptive.

Some of the same things apply to hurricanes, which are supposed to be FEWER in number, but stronger, in the future. I’m skeptical about that. If you look at the correlation between SST and wind speed, a rise of few degC rise in SST won’t turn the average Category 2 storm into an average Category 3. Hurricanes are powered by the difference between SST and the temperature at the tropopause, not by SST alone. The lapse rate will diminish and the tropopause will rise, so the changes are in opposite direction. IMO, no one really knows what the future holds for hurricanes – despite all the hype associated with each major storm. We have made strides in minimizing the damage and death caused by hurricanes.

SLR is rising at about 1 inch per decade and we aren’t quite sure yet if this rate is accelerating. If current acceleration were 1 inch/decade/decade, we would know it. Acceleration of 1 inch/decade/decade would produce about 2 feet of SLR by the end of the century, about the IPCC’s central estimate. As best I can tell, we are on track for the bottom their projection, not the 1 m or more being pushed by alarmists. The Holocene Climate Optimum was warmer than today in the Arctic and the polar bears, the GIS and sea level did fine.

When you convince me how much future warming is needed to produce a catastrophe, I’ll decide whether I think a catastrophe is coming and advise my elected representatives. In the meantime, Steven Schneider and you have taught me that saving the world from unnecessary CAGW alarmism means that my side needs to get loads of publicity by telling scary stories about the cost of decarbonizing, making simplified dramatic statements about the hiatus, and hiding any doubts I might have. Lord Monckton will be the perfect antidotes for Al Gore.

When you convince me how much future warming is needed to produce a catastrophe, I’ll decide whether I think a catastrophe is coming and advise my elected representatives.

Assuming you’re not just modelling a paradigm of catastrophe-denial, and taking your challenge at face value, it’s highly improbable that any amount of evidence will convince you. As I pointed out in an earlier comment, your definition of “catastrophic” apparently excludes anything that doesn’t affect you personally. The mere threat, and even the reality, of someone else’s loss of home, livelihood and life can’t qualify. The armor of your selfishness is impenetrable, so the question of how you can be sure you won’t be affected personally shall be left unasked. I concede the argument, in favor of letting the inexorable working-out of basic physics go upside yo’ head in due course.

Lord Monckton will be the perfect antidotes for Al Gore.

You’re aware that neither of them is a scientist, aren’t you? Not to worry, denial is the perfect antidote to science.

Mal Adjusted wrote: “Assuming you’re not just modelling a paradigm of catastrophe-denial, and taking your challenge at face value, it’s highly improbable that any amount of evidence will convince you.”

It should be obvious from my analysis of the 2011 drought that I am willing to look at the factual evidence about the role of aGHG in this event (a catastrophe for some who experienced it). I’ve repeatedly asked you for a specific amount of future warming that will produce “global catastrophe” – and a modest rational for your opinion. Your refusal to do so suggests that even you don’t find your answer convincing. This is why parallels between the historical Holocaust and the possible coming climate holocaust are grossly inappropriate: There is convincing evidence about the former and a wide range of uncertainty about the latter, despite what is known about what aGHGs do in the environment. I thought our host had temporarily lost his senses by mentioning Holocaust denia1 at a website devoted to critical analysis of climate science, but (as usual) there is much to be learned from his post.

A billion people cling to a marginal existence on this planet; their lives could be swept away at any moment by chaotic fluctuations in the weather. Our affluence and technology (partially created by burning fossil fuels) allowed Texans to survive such an event in 2011 with few deaths and provided a social safety net for those who suffered the most. Billions more on this planet live in much greater poverty than the poorest in developed countries. The bottom 5th percentile in the US is at the 68th percentile worldwide and are more affluent than the top 5th percentile in India. (See the chart taken from a book at http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/tag/income-inequality).

LBJ declared war on poverty. Nixon declared war on cancer. WIlson declared war to end all wars. None of them or their advisors had the slightest idea of how to achieve their goals (but after 25 years of research, we finally produced some medicines capable of rationally, but often temporarily, curing cancer.) We are currently subsidizing numerous renewable energy programs with “external costs” which are probably far greater than most estimates of the “social cost” of carbon emissions they eliminate. About 10% of our automotive fuel now comes from corn, but that only raised the cost of food without reducing CO2 emissions. IMO, the external costs of rooftop solar will eventually be found to be far higher than the social cost of the CO2 emissions they eliminate (and the subsidizes go mostly to the affluent). The road to he11 is paved with good intentions. Your saying we need to “avoid catastrophe” isn’t good enough.

“I’ve only read about 350 papers on paleoclimate and I’m confused about the origin of the high confidence as I explained in Ghosts of Climate Past -Eighteen – “Probably Nonlinearity” of Unknown Origin.”

Science of Doom

I will make a climate prediction with high confidence and tell me if you disagree. I predict that Earth will get out of the Quaternary ice age after the atmospheric CO2 exceeded 1,000 ppm. My confidence stems from paleoclimates.

In earth’s 4.5 billion years history, there have never been an ice age when CO2 was over 1,000 ppm. Not even the Milankovic cycles, shutdown of thermohaline circulation, supervolcano eruptions, giant asteroid impacts and 30% drop in solar insolation could start an ice age for 2.4 billion years. The greenhouse effect dominated them all.

There is one exception. The Ordovician ice age occurred when CO2 was over 4,000 ppm. I hypothesize it was caused by a gamma ray burst that created photochemical smog in the atmosphere blocking sunlight. (Melott et al, 2008)

I propose outgassing of CO2 in the oceans and methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia and Canada as strong positive feedback that will accelerate greenhouse warming until a global equilibrium temperature of around 20 C is attained. It may take hundreds or thousands of years after exceeding 1,000 ppm CO2 for earth to get out of the current ice age. It will be unstoppable except possibly through geoengineering. This is my Tipping Point Hypothesis.

I d3ny the moral authority of the current presiding bishop. Previous presiding bishops have said and done a lot of equally foolish things in the past, enough so to cause something of a schism in the Anglican church worldwide.

where after a no-doubt thorough trawl of the web, Nova found a total of 9 references (some dubious). Poptech is linked, but the archive page is gone. I’d read that article, too, and can’t remember the number of hits he came up with (less than 25, I believe, some also dubious).

Commentators drawing the comparison are few. Some have more reach than others, but it still seems scanty evidence for a trend in thought. (Pro-AGW) commentary explicitly rejecting that link is far more common. As I’ve followed the debate over the years, it is the anti-AGW commentators themselves who have popularized this connection. Although I can’t prove it, I am confident that very few people on the other side of the debate conflate the phrases. I certainly don’t. A de…r is one who denies, no more or less.

I’ve acquiesced to not using the term, but that is for practical purposes, not because I think the notion of this conflation has merit. ‘De…r’ is very often the most appropriate, least awkward characterization. A grammatical choice could be taken to use the verb, but it’s annoying to circumlocute because of a false flag erected almost entirely by the ‘skeptics.’

Barry wrote: “Commentators drawing the comparison are few. Some have more reach than others, but it still seems scanty evidence for a trend in thought. (Pro-AGW) commentary explicitly rejecting that link is far more common.”

You should read that article again. The reporter, Abby Ohlheiser, wrote what you quoted, BTW also giving no evidence to support it. But Bill Nye (and many others with scientific background), in the piece that the Ohlheiser article discusses, wrote:

…As scientific skeptics, we are well aware of political efforts to undermine climate science by those who d..y reality but do not engage in scientific research or consider evidence that their deeply held opinions are wrong. The most appropriate word to describe the behavior of those individuals is “d….l.” Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are d….rs. But virtually all d….rs have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry.

We are skeptics who have devoted much of our careers to practicing and promoting scientific skepticism. We ask that journalists use more care when reporting on those who reject climate science, and hold to the principles of truth in labeling. Please stop using the word “skeptic” to describe d….rs.

(forbidden words sanitized).

I’m still not buying the attempt to put advocates for climate action on the defensive.

That pro-AGW commentators reject the automatic link between holocaust denial and AGW (risk) denial? Easy. Well, not so easy. I’ve had to elide the bad word in some of the links. You’ll have to add the two letters in if you want to check these references.

“Barry: If you don’t think the 43 citations linking climate change skepticism to Holocaust denia1 at PopTech are enough…”

Many of them are pretty tenuous. Others are straightforward, and I think the conflation is hugely inappropriate. But I don’t think it has currency, except in the minds of some ‘skeptics.’

I noticed amongst the commenters I linked, that some of them, like me, have not seen this conflation (except at JoNova’s and PopTech’s). Some also commented that the crew pushing this conflation are, it seems to them (and me), the ‘skeptics’. From my point of view this was a non-issue until ‘skeptics’ made it so.

If anyone has the moral authority explicitly to compare the d….l of adverse AGW impacts to Holocaust d….l (which comparison I think is — presently — overdrawn), it would be a person who has survived the Holocaust. By making this comparison, Tomkiewicz implicitly rejects the idea that it demeans the suffering of Holocaust victims or whitewashes the monstrosity of the N..i perpetrators. He has shed real blood and real tears over real injuries inflicted upon him by real N..is. And while he is only one person, and cannot (of course) speak for every Holocaust victim, his status gives him a special viewpoint that those who don’t have it cannot match. As such, that viewpoint deserves special consideration.

Once again, I view the tut-tutting over the use of the the d words as a rhetorical technique intended to put advocates for climate action on the defensive. Fortunately, the d words have such a long history and wide usage in the language that this technique is unlikely to do much more than fan some blog debates and raise 0.001% more bucks for d…….t politicians. Ever searched nytimes.com for the d words? You might learn something.

Barry: Thanks for the excellent set of links, which demonstrate your point: Some commentators do clearly explain that their use of the word “den1er” is not meant to imply any reference to the Holocaust. So I assume that we can agree that some people using the term intend to imply a connection and some do not. Given those that do, I think you are wise to avoid the term.

Reading the links you provide makes it obvious that the term “den1er” is used to provide an alternative to the term “skeptic”. Those who believe we are headed for catastrophic AGW that requires immediate and drastic reductions in CO2 emission feel that “skeptic” is too respectful a term for their opponents. Is this true?

1) Is den1er an appropriate term for scientists like Lindzen, Christy, Pielke Jr., and Curry? I don’t think Einstein was ever called a “den1er” of Newtonian gravity or quantum mechanics, Hoyle a “den1er” of the Big Bang, or H C Brown a “den1er” of non-classical carbonium ions. (www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1994/illpres/problem.html). Lindzen et al are skeptical of our knowledge of climate sensitivity and feedbacks.

2) When scientific experts have disagreements, do amateur scientists (such as Andy Watts) or politicians (such as Inhofe) deserve a less respectful label (den1er) than professional scientists? Perhaps this term could be applied to those who ignore what is accepted by essentially all scientists (the GHE, the 120 ppm rise in CO2 is mostly caused by burning fossil fuel). IMO, Watts and Inhofe are not careful enough discriminating between “responsible” and “irresponsible skepticism”, but those terms aren’t easy to define. Unlike scientists, politicians, lawyers and policy advocates aren’t ethically obligated to present all sides of an issue.

3) Why do CAGW, evolution and believers in the Holocaust label their opponents “deniers” rather than “skeptics”?

In the case of the Holocaust, we are dealing with rejection of a large body of historical evidence concerning religious persecution. The justification for granting the Jews a religious homeland is also involved.

Religion is also involved in the debate over evolution. Random genetic mutation, natural selection and survival of the fittest can be observed in the laboratory. These processes certainly appear to have shaped the species and fossils we know about today (though an omnipotent deity could always create this illusion). That science, however, doesn’t come close to proving that life on earth originated when some naturally-occurring RNA molecules with the necessary catalytic activities ended up inside the same lipid vesicle by chance. (This may have been what happened, but we haven’t reproduced it in the laboratory.) The idea that we exist merely because of chance is repulsive to most religions.

Some skeptics feel that the word “denia1” is used in climate change because a type of “religious belief” is involved. Skeptics are “deny1ng” that man is an inherently and uniquely evil species that is destroying our planet’s environment like a plague of locust destroys a green field. As with evolution, there are some facts (like the GHE and natural selection) that essential all scientists accept and some controversial theories (the utility of AOGCMs and the role of chance in the origin of life) that are unproven.

In my personal opinion, it is the religious aspects of CAGW that cause skeptics to be unfairly described as “den1ers”. When science is involved, the appropriate term is generally “skeptical”. When religion or politics are involved, we “deeny”. IMO, Aa religious motivation is prompting the call to limit climate change to 2 degC (now 1.5 degC) above pre-industrial (the end of the LIA!) and to limit CO2 to 450 ppm (or even 350 ppm) in blind obedience to the precautionary principle – without considering cost/benefit analysis, adaptation, whether climate sensitivity is 1.5, 3.0 or 4.5 degC, or the limitations of human rationality. (Can you imagine giving scientists and politicians sweeping powers and financial resources in 1900 because they said they knew how to make the world a better place a century later? What if they had been eugenicists or Marxists or believed the planet couldn’t support even one billion people or believed that economic growth couldn’t persist indefinitely?)

Above, the term “religion” also encompasses some aspects of politics: Excessive faith in or fear of central planning, the free market, nuclear power, international cooperation and human nature. “Den1er is merely a term used to unfairly discredit political/religious opponents?

By the way, there’s an alternative to an omnipotent, or as close to it as never mind, being creating a physical universe. In his Culture series, the last novel of which is The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain Banks has suggested the possibility that what we perceive as a real universe is actually a simulation:

The Hydrogen Sonata (2012) also advances a particularly provocative meditation on significance—does reality even really exist? The Culture Minds involved in the Gzilt affair run highly detailed simulations in their computerized substrates to model the various outcomes that may happen in reality. This long-established practice of running simulations had led to what the Minds call the “Simming Problem”: How true to life and sentient was it ethical to allow simulations to become? (p. 271). Predictive modeling is more accurate the more lifelike and sentient that the beings in the simulation are allowed to become—but then afterward what should be done with a simulated reality containing thinking, feeling beings? This raises “the ever-vexing question, How do we know we’re not in a simulation? There were sound, seemingly base-reality mathematically convincing and inescapable reasons for believing that all concerned in this ongoing debate about simulational ethics were genuinely at the base level of reality” but such “reassuring signs might all just be part of the illusion”

In my personal opinion, it is the religious aspects of CAGW that cause skeptics to be unfairly described as “den1ers”.

Helpful approach. For myself I see CAGW as a political religion and widespread use of “Den1er” as a significant part of that. Michael Burleigh uses this category to explain the deep attraction for many Germans of Hitler, Goebbels and their myth-making, in his book The Third Reich: A New History. Sharing the category does not of course mean equivalence of impact. For one thing CAGW attempts to be global in its political and religious reach. And it hasn’t reached the stage, in ideological or power terms, of advocating and carrying out mass murder to “save the planet”. Perhaps it never will get anywhere near that. Less demonisation of its enemies and more honest engagement with the best of its critics – McIntyre on paleoclimate, Lindzen and Lewis on sensitivity, etc – would I’m sure ensure it never did. But while the demonisation is present honest engagement appears to be impossible (an empirical observation more than an ideological stance). In observing this one doesn’t have to commit to causation or motivation – in other words Michael Mann doesn’t necessarily choose to demonise consciously in order to avoid dealing with the details of McIntyre’s critique. But that is the effect, conscious or otherwise. It’s a nexus of negative and unproductive reaction that we have to expose and do something about. As part of this I don’t think it’s asking too much for Den1er to be shunned by all. It won’t solve all demonisation issues but it might go further than many think.

“advocating mass murder to ‘save the planet'”, otherwise known as The Twelve Monkeys (the original movie, not the recent SyFy TV series) solution. There’s nothing wrong that couldn’t be cured by a properly engineered virus.

It is d…….t to dispute well-established scientific theories without providing strong evidence of an important defect. This kind of d……sm is rife in public forums, in forms such as arguing that the GHE doesn’t exist, that it violates the laws of thermodynamics, that humans aren’t responsible for the ~40% increase of CO2 since ~1870, that CO2 is an insignificant trace gas, that there is no significant water-vapor feedback (often while concurrently arguing that water vapor is the strongest GHG), etc.

It is d…….t to argue that uncertainty in warming projections and/or in the effect of projected warming, is a reason to delay action to avoid further warming. Uncertainty inherently broadens the PDF without biasing it to either wing. Thus, arguing for delay because of uncertainty presumes — contrary to the evidence — that warming and/or warming effects *will* be less damaging than the consensus view.

It is d…….t to repeatedly recycle hypotheses that are based upon cherrypicking the data. This is seen both in arguments by the general public and in those of a few practioners who should know better.

It is d…….t (and nihilist) to inveigh against “consensus science”. Virtual all science is “consensus science”; the vast majority of scientific advances build upon a pre-existing framework that is provisionally accepted by practitioners because it is the best existing explanation for relevant phenomena.

It is d…….t (and nihilist) to insist that science must be bulletproof before we take action. All science is provisional, and most of it is incomplete. For example, we know that general relativity contradicts quantum theory (the former requires singularities, the latter bans them), so at least one of the theories is defective. Yet they both predict a broad range of phenomena, so we treat them as useful (e.g., in making GPS, semiconductors, etc.), and continue our efforts to improve them.

It is d…….t to repeatedly recycle the many baseless accusations arising from the East Anglia hacking.

It is d…….t to argue that meaningful mitigation spells economic doom, especially when doing so based upon gut instincts. Also the defects in modern climate modeling are dwarfed by the defects in modern economic modeling, so to make such a bald assertion of doom is, at best, unsupported speculation.

It is approaching d…….t to repeatedly recycle hypotheses that have grave difficulties accounting for well-documented climate behavior, including paleoclimatic behavior.

And how successful has the use of pejorative labeling , which is fundamentally an argumentum ad hominem, been in promoting your cause? IMO, not very. It plays well to the peanut gallery at activist sites, but it amounts to preaching to the choir.

How about those who accept the need to do something starting now, but are adamantly opposed to nuclear power as part of the solution? Wind, solar, hydro and biomass only is not a feasible solution. What label would you apply to them?

Meow: What DeWitt said. Couldn’t all your paragraphs start with “I disagree with…”? What would be lost? One thing for certain would be gained: increased likelihood of real dialogue with those with whom you differ. SoD’s additional big reason, slightly modified, is that you’d be in no danger of trivialising one of the worst atrocities in history. That aspect is also a very great inhibitor of genuine debate. From where I sit your insistence on droning on with the d-word is lose-lose. Unless you don’t want debate. Feel free to explain.

@DeWitt Payne: I do not accept the idea that calling a spade a spade is pejorative or ad hominem. I have no hard data on the efficacy of the d terms; do you? And on nuclear power, I think there is some d……sm of the need for it in the short term, before we are able sufficiently to obviate renewables’ intermittency problems via appropriate innovation.

Don’t kid yourself. You’re not calling a spade a spade. It’s like having a debate about what tools should be used for a job in the garden and you insist on calling a spade a murder weapon. This skews all otherwise well-intentioned discussion and even rational thought on the subject. Even this far-fetched analogy doesn’t touch on what you and your fellow-abusers of language are doing to the memory of victims of the Holocaust. Keeping your worldview together so depends on demonisation that you scream at the suggestion of having to modify your language to cool bad feelings. Very instructive.

It is d…….t to use rhetorical tricks to make anthropogenic warming appear smaller in magnitude than it is or is likely to be. I note a recent uptick in arguments of the form “3K is only ~1% of the earth’s temperature of ~288K, so what’s the big deal?” and “Hey, the temperature in my backyard changes 30 degrees between dawn and 2pm, so what’s the big deal with 3 or 4 degrees?” This kind of argument is intended to hijack the general public’s common sense instead of educating it.

Is seeing climate concern as an availability cascade den1alist? I only ask because it’s a new one on me. Does every single mode of analysis and conclusion drawn, over the whole of science and policy, have to be reduced to this binary D/non-D universe? How about engaging with the arguments?

It is d…….t to accuse scientists who accept the consensus view on climate change of not responding to arguments from those who dispute that view.

First, many of the disputants’ arguments are rebunkings of arguments that scientists long ago addressed and discarded for good reasons, such as the ideas that the GHE doesn’t exist, that it violates the laws of thermodynamics, that most of the CO2 increase since ~1870 is due to volcanoes, that there is no significant water-vapor feedback, that “it’s warming on Mars too, so it’s the sun!”, that “there was global warming long ago; did dinosaurs have SUVs too?????” etc.

Second, some high-profile scientists run blogs that engage the general public on a wide range of topics, e.g., Realclimate, Variable Variability, Isaac Held, etc.

Third, (2) is going above and beyond scientists’ main job, which is to push the frontiers of knowledge. Time taken from that task to debunk repeated rebunkings of bunk is largely wasted time, and cannot reasonably be expected.

Fourth, if someone has an idea, he is free to publish it widely, to submit it to journals, to stage events to promote it, to protest if he feels his ideas haven’t been heard, etc. He is also free to do the hard work to show his idea’s merit. Maybe more time in the lab and less on the blogs endorsing bunk as “interesting” or calling advocates for climate action “N..is” would encourage more scientists to take his ideas seriously.

Fifth, Galileos are rare, but people who compare themselves to Galileo are distressingly common.

Meow’s rant (April 8, 2015 at 5:03 pm) about “d…….t” is an excellent demonstration of the religious/political nature of the CAGW alarmism. I’d like to address all of his points/mis-representations, but that would take far too long. I’ll address just the first one, which is the subject of this post.

Meow writes: “It is d…….t to dispute well-established scientific theories without providing strong evidence of an important defect…”

Our host has more personal experience than almost anyone else with the difficulties of explaining the complicated science of the GHE, feedbacks, radiative-convective equilibrium, attribution and AOGCMs. After more than a half-decade of running this blog with scientific integrity – often taking on misconceptions (including some of my own) with incredible patience – SOD writes above:

“The worst you could say is people who don’t accept ‘consensus climate science’ are likely finding basic – or advanced – thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer and statistics a little difficult and might have misunderstood, or missed, a step somewhere. The best you could say is with such a complex subject straddling so many different disciplines, they might be entitled to have a point.”

I’ll add that the only things we know with reasonable confidence are that a doubling of CO2 will produce a warming of about 1.2 degC without feedbacks and that warming will be amplified by a combined water vapor-lapse rate feedback of about 1 W/m2/K from clear skies (models and observations). Using the most likely estimate for ECS from energy balance models, the total of the remaining feedbacks is negligible. Climate models predict moderate to strongly positive cloud feedback using parameters that are tuned – not obtained from fundamental physics or individually constrained by observations or experiments. They also produce cloud and ice-albedo feedbacks during the seasonal cycle that seriously disagree with each other and with observations from space. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/19/7568.full.pdf They also over-estimate the amount of warming observed during the satellite era despite excessive cooling from aerosols. All of the IPCC’s reports and projections are based on these models.

Meow thinks that those who fail to master this difficult subject and reach the same conclusion he/she has should be described using the same term as those who reject the existence of the Holocaust.

To make matters worse, Steven Schneider – the patron saint of politicized climate science – has told his peers that it is acceptable to “tell scary stories” when trying to “make the world a better place”, creating an ethical double-bind for every climate scientist to resolve personally. His recommendation has never been challenged by his peers. Nor has the climate science community challenged those who have gone too far while trying to “make the world a better place”. (Yamal, for example) One can read RealClimate, but there is certainly no reason to assume their authors feel ethically bound by Schneider’s description of scientific method – “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts.” In the IPCC’s reports, caveats are buried in a 1000 page report and generally ignored by the carefully-selected scientists and politicians who write the SPM.

CAGW were as well documented as the Holocaust, “den1er” would be an appropriate characterization.

And that’s just the radiative transfer science. You haven’t scratched the surface of the poorly documented consequences of warming and their associated costs, IPCC Working Group 2, nor the costs of mitigation vs. adaptation, IPCC Working Group 3.

Steve Mcintyre would never claim to be a world expert but he took time out to have a look at WG3 of IPCC AR4 and the WG2 report on extreme events, SREX, for a talk he gave at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London in August 2012, summarised by Andrew Orlowski in his article Climate policy crippled by pointless feel-good gestures. I was privileged to be there. What came across was that, even compared to a WG1 series from 2001 that included all the hockey stick and related paleo guff, these reports were mind-numbingly vacuous and shoddy. The uncertainty therefore is as great as it can be – except that most policy gestures sp far are pointless. That is the one thing that is certain, as decent physicists like Professor Michael Kelly over here have explained very well.

To use den1er and its cognates in these areas is an even greater outrage therefore. For the more dodgy the subject matter Holocaust denial analogies are deemed to apply to, the more this makes mockery of the suffering of millions in the throes of real torture and mass murder. That’s why I asked defenders of the term much earlier to say who and what lay outside the D-word’s scope. But they didn’t then and, speaking from around eight year’s experience, they never do. It’s propaganda-only, without real meaning, let alone precision thereof, but assumed to have deep meaning by the unwary. And in the process of all that the real Holocaust is trivialised.

It is d…….t to treat the consensus position on AGW as a hoax, fraud, c…..ist plot, sloppily done, uninformed, twaddle, etc., without oneself developing a strong command of the science, and then providing clear and convincing documentation of the defects. Of course, such a command is beyond most peoples’ abilities, as SoD implied. So instead, some who have pre-existing attitudes of the form “I think that addressing AGW will require economic and/or societal changes that I think will be bad” reason backwards from there to the premise of hoax/fraud/plot/sloppiness/etc. In this, they are aided by a very small contingent of practitioners who promote various kinds of baseless doubt. There is the promotion of uncertainty (which, in reality, increases the possibility of very bad AGW effects just as much as it increases the possibility of very mild ones). There is the embrace on blogs of various kinds of long-debunked bunk as “interesting”. Sometimes those who advocate action to avoid AGW consequences are likened to N..is, which, ironically, has been defended in this comments section.

None of this says that the consensus position is perfect. It is not. Much is unknown. I particularly would like to have better radiation measurements at the TOA, better albedo figures, far more computing power to eliminate as many model parameterizations as possible (especially for clouds; see below), more fine-grained paleo data, better measurements of aerosol effects (including paleo-aerosols), and so on.

But simply to put aside the consensus position — which has been arrived at through decades of work by thousands of very intelligent and dedicated people, who work under real constraints — without having clear and convincing documentation of significant defect, is d…….t. That spade is a spade.

Your specific criticisms deserve a longer response than I can give now, but here are a few problems:

o “the total of the remaining [non-WV/lapse rate] feedbacks is negligible” ignores ice-albedo feedback, estimated at ~0.3 +- 0.1 W/m^2 from models and possibly larger from observations (see AR5 WG1 s.9.7.2.2). This is ~15-20% of the total feedback estimated for CMIP5 models (see AR5 WG1 Fig. 9.43), which is not “negligible”.

o “Climate models predict moderate to strongly positive cloud feedback using parameters that are tuned – not obtained from fundamental physics or individually constrained by observations or experiments” paints an incorrect picture. First, almost all the CMIP5 models show cloud feedbacks of ~-0.05-0.5 W/m^2, with a mean of ~0.25 (see AR5 WG1 Fig. 9.43), which is not “strongly positive” (especially if 0.3 from ice-albedo feedback, above, is considered “negligible”). Second, the parameters are not “tuned” to reach some predetermined result. They are adjusted to be consistent with regressions obtained from observations and from high-resolution, small-scale simulations as far as is currently practicable. See AR5 WG1 s.7.2.2 & 7.2.3. Third, the models incorporate as much fundamental physics as our computing budgets allow; see, e.g., AR5 WG1 s.7.2.3.2.2 on mixed-phase clouds. If we had much more computing power than we do, we could much more closely simulate cloud processes. On all this, AR5 notes frankly, “Many cloud processes are unrealistic in current GCMs, and as such their cloud response to climate change remains uncertain.”

To sum it up, the picture is much more subtle and involved than your broad-brush characterization.

o The Tsushima & Manabe paper you cite says the following about the net difference between model averages and observations:

The average total gain factor of all sky feedback of the CMIP models is 0.71. It is similar in magnitude to the 0.71, 0.67, and 0.73
obtained from ERBE, CERES SRBAVG, and CERES EBAF, respectively.

So the models aren’t quite as awful as you’ve painted, particularly given the authors’ proviso that “the geographical pattern of the annual variation [that they use to compare observations to models] is quite different from that of global warming.”

In this, they are aided by a very small contingent of practitioners who promote various kinds of baseless doubt.

Could you name names please? In particular could you give examples of practitioners, as you call them, with whom you disagree and that

1. You do class as den1ers
2. You don’t class as den1ers.

Are there are such practitioners in 2? The comparison with 1 could really advance the debate here.

Sometimes those who advocate action to avoid AGW consequences are likened to N..is, which, ironically, has been defended in this comments section.

Could you also be precise here, by saying who defended use of “N..is” and provide a link so that readers can judge the context. I have a slight suspicion you might include me you see. But the weasel words have gone deep with you my friend. Why not spit it out.

Oops, I just noticed a silly mistake. The feedback figures I quoted should (of course) be in units of W/m^2/K, not W/m^2. Also, emerging research is pointing toward some near-term carbon-cycle feedback from melting permafrost. See, e.g., MacDougall et al 2012, http://www2.cgd.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/asp-colloquium/files/MacDougall-Avis-etal-2012.pdf . (Note that that paper assumes all of the carbon released from permafrost arrives as CO2, so it underestimates the RF from the portion that arrives as CH4).

So no names of the “very small contingent of practitioners who promote various kinds of baseless doubt”? And which of them you call den1ers? Aren’t those questions of central relevance to this thread? How can your blanking them in any way lend credence to the use of the term by you and others?

Meow: Thanks for discussing something besides “d…t”, which is religion to me.

In AR5 Table 9.5, we have multi-model means of -3.2 W/m2/K for Planck feedback, 1.0 for VW+LR, 0.3 for ice-albedo feedback (IA) and 0.3 for clouds (CF). These fast feedbacks produce a climate sensitivity (CS) of 2.4 K for periods short enough that slower feedbacks haven’t become important. (The same models produce higher ECS when they are run to “equilibrium”. We can’t confirm these higher numbers because only paleoclimate provides information about such slow processes and those confidence intervals are too wide to be very useful.)

Slow feedbacks aren’t relevant to the seasonal cycle in Manabe’s paper and may not play a big role the decadal energy balance models in Otto (2013). (One might expect slow feedbacks to play some role in Lewis and Curry (2014), but let’s set aside this complication). So we might expect to see some confirmation for the IPCCs values for these fast feedbacks from the seasonal cycle and energy balance models. If WV+LR is +1.0 W/m2/K and IA is +0.3 W/m2, one needs CF to be +0.1 to get CS of 2.0 K . If you want to get CS down to 1.5 K, CF needs to be -0.3 W/m2/K. So energy balance models are saying that CF and/or CF+IAF is small or negligible compared with WV+LR.

The seasonal cycle in Manabe (2013) is harder to interpret. The only unambiguous message from the paper is that AOGCMs fail badly and inconsistently at reproducing the robust observed changes in LWR and SWR. The seasonal cycle is not global warming – it is one hemisphere warming while the other is cooling. LWR from clear skies is probably a reasonable model for WV+LR feedback in GW. SWR from clear skies shows a large ice-albedo feedback due to the asymmetric distribution of land (with snow in winter). Quantitatively, It has nothing to do with the ice albedo feedback in GW, but the models perform poorly. LWR from all skies is similar to LWR from clear skies, suggesting that cloud feedback is not strongly positive in the LWR channel. The differences between clouds in the hemispheres makes the SWR signal for cloudy skies (albedo) hard to interpret.

Despite the discussion you cite from AR5 about improvements in modeling clouds, in the end cloud parameters are tuned to best reproduce the earth’s albedo, precipitation, and other observables. If your model doesn’t get the big picture approximately right (especially albedo), you aren’t in the game. In the end, CMIP5 didn’t perform better than CMIP3 in Manabe’s paper. The models aren’t tuned to produce a particular ECS, but the tuners probably know from perturbed physics ensembles which parameters could be adjusted to produce lower climate sensitivity.

“Individual model components (e.g., the atmosphere, the ocean, etc.) are typically first evaluated in isolation as part of the model development process. For instance, the atmospheric component can be evaluated by prescribing sea surface temperature (SST) (Gates et al., 1999) or the ocean and land components by prescribing atmospheric conditions (Barnier et al., 2006; Griffies et al., 2009). Subsequently, the various components are assembled into a comprehensive model, which then undergoes a systematic evaluation. At this stage, a small subset of model parameters remains to be adjusted so that the model adheres to large-scale observational constraints (often global averages). This final parameter adjustment procedure is usually referred to as ‘model tuning’. Model tuning aims to match observed climate system behaviour and so is connected to judgements as to what constitutes a skilful representation of the Earth’s climate. For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).

With very few exceptions (Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013) modelling centres do not routinely describe in detail how they tune their models. Therefore the complete list of observational constraints toward which a particular model is tuned is generally not available. However, it is clear that tuning involves trade-offs; this keeps the number of constraints that can be used small and usually focuses on global mean measures related to budgets of energy, mass and momentum. It has been shown for at least one model that the tuning process does not necessarily lead to a single, unique set of parameters for a given model, but that different combinations of parameters can yield equally plausible models (Mauritsen et al., 2012). Hence the need for model tuning may increase model uncertainty. There have been recent efforts to develop systematic parameter optimization methods, but owing to model complexity they cannot yet be applied to fully coupled climate models (Neelin et al., 2010).”

“The present paper is an outcome of 15 years of research on clouds and convection parameterization in the community in general, and in the team that develops the LMDZ model in particular. A version of the model, LMDZ5B, with new parameterizations has been developed, which is used for CMIP5. Important improvements in the climate simulations arise from the improvement of the physical parameterizations.

1.The low-levels cloud coverage is better represented in the new version as well as the thermodynamic and diurnal cycle of the boundary layer. Additional evaluation by comparison with continuous in-situ observations in the Paris area is presented by Cheruy et al. (submitted).

2.The improvement of the boundary layer parameterization results in a better representation of the SW CRF in the tropics, both in terms of spatial distribution and dependency on large scale dynamical regimes.

3.The mid-level cloud coverage is also simulated better with the NP version, although the coverage is still underestimated when compared with the Calipso-GOCCP dataset.

4.The maximum of the diurnal cycle of convective rainfall over continents is shifted by several hours.

5.Tropical rainfall variability is much larger in the NP version, in better agreement with observations, in particular in the location, and spectral range associated with the Madden Julian Oscillation.

The improvements described above are robust in the sense that the conclusions are not modified by tuning the free parameters in the range of acceptable values. Also, for points 1 and 4, the confidence comes for a large part from the fact that the same improvements are observed in single-column simulations of test cases as in the 3D forced or coupled model.
The NP version, as any climate model, is however subject to significant biases, and SOME OF THOSE BIASES ARE EVEN STRONGER IN THE NP THAN IN THE SP VERSION. Some of them are also significantly affected by the tuning of free parameters needed to minimize biases and drifts in the coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations.”

As I read it, they have made major improvements in the representation of clouds that resulted in a huge lowering of ECS, but the new model isn’t a better overall representation of current climate. The “progress” and quantitative information from the multi-model mean described in AR5 are (in IMO) built on a foundation of quicksand. So that makes me a “den1er”?

A good article, except it omits the key issue and that is that the claims of the IPCC and other authorities don’t actually match the measurements. They match the reports [computer models] but given that those have failed as predictive tools, so what?

The science is not as clear-cut as suggested.

Altering past records to hide the raw data, Climategate, the phoney ‘consensus’, Al Gore calling for those who disagree with him to be punished [his word], others calling for criminalisation of such disagreeing for ‘Crimes against humanity’ and so on, show that their scientific ethics are not the most admirable. Nor do the perpetrators have to endure criticism for their actions from their own groups. So why trust them?

Why don’t these people trust the scientific process but instead insist on demonising those who disagree? The instinctive response in the rest of us is ‘what are they trying to hide’? Surely they’re not personally profiting from their beliefs?

The co-founder of Greenpeace Patrick Moore said it’s not science but a religion. Jailing people for their thinking sounds like the Inquisition. It took Europe many centuries and millions of lives to get free from religious persecution so why trust the new Global Warming Priesthood?

If scientists were left alone to do science [which means including dissident views] instead of threatening them with punishment, then perhaps we’d get to the truth and there may be no need for all these dubious acts to crush dissent.

But why trust people who base their views on models rather than measurement, indulge in duplicitous acts, and who refuse the right of others to disagree?

How badly have climate models failed? The fundamental science applied by climate models has been validated experimentally, but the parameters needed to apply that science to large grid cells in a climate model has not. A recent paper showed that current models predict roughly a 25% chance of no warming in any five-year period of rising GHGs and (25%)^n chance of no warming in n five year periods. The current hiatus (3 such five-periods, about a 2% chance) is clearly inconsistent with observations. That tells us that something is wrong: input forcing, model climate sensitivity or model unforced variability.

1) We know that solar activity has been a little weaker and volcanic aerosols may have been a little thicker than expected during the hiatus. This naturally-forced variability might explain a modest portion of the discrepancy.

2) The observed rate of warming in the satellite era is about 70% of that predicted by models. If models overestimate climate sensitivity, that could explain part of the hiatus. A 30% reduction in future warming won’t eliminate our danger.

3) Evidence for unforced natural oscillations in climate like the AMO has grown. Climate models don’t produce such oscillations. That problem could explain the hiatus. Unfortunately, every precedented form of natural variability (not even the LIA) is much smaller than the warming projected from a future doubling (from today’s level) of CO2.

Any one of the three explanations above probably eliminates the statistical inconsistency between model projections and observations during the hiatus without eliminating future danger.

People become scientists to: a) discover and share “fundamental truth”, b) make the world a better place, and c) become famous. The latter two motives make it harder to be appropriately skeptical about new results (from a scientific perspective). When scientists become policy advocates, they encounter a different system for discovering the “truth” needed to create good policy – an adversarial system where no one is expected to point out the weaknesses of their position and many exaggerate, distort or dissemble. The system only works – to the extent that it does work – because all sides are given equal time to present their views. Climate science has been co-opted by one side of the debate to suppress public discourse through an artificial scientific consensus. The question for those who recognize – or think they recognize – how science is being mis-used is what to do about it. You can say: “I’ve been deceived, so I’ll never trust them again.” You won’t discover scientific “truth” with that strategy.

the Holocaust hook is tasteless. I make fun of Netanyahu all the time, but I don’t see the link between this subject and mass murder of that nature. Also, climate models have a long, long, long way to go.